Oct 22 2007
How to teach kids about cancer
With October being breast cancer awareness month, I was just thinking that this month will reach almost everybody except children.
So I am on a quest to find some cancer awareness games for children and stumbled upon www.makewish.org/ben.
Ben, a kid with cancer made a wish to create a video game that could explain other children what cancer is and most important: what is needed to cure cancer.
Ben always wins
This shows the incredible amount of optimism children have I find. Although Ben explains that he want’s to teach children the good and not so good aspects of curing cancer only. Somehow he is right: what’s the use in teaching somebody he can die, that’s quite universal knowledge.
The cancer game
If you look at the graphics, you can see that it’s quite a sophisticated game, not your 2 cents Pac Man…
Ben says there are 3 key-points in your battle against cancer:
- health from the hospital,
- ammo from the pharmacy and
- attitude, which you get from home
Through the game the players will hit some setbacks : electrified barriers, which makes you lose some attitude. According to Ben, this is pretty much how you can summarize your fight against cancer.
Players move around the game on a skateboard and will come across:
- a fever monster throwing fireballs
- a giant
- evil chickens representing chicken pox
- a robot called Robarf hurling a green gooey mess representing the sickness most children with cancer will face.
Main thing is that each player needs to use up some of their health to destroy the cancer cells, which is pretty much what chemo-therapy is all about.
So if you have a kid with cancer and you are struggling with how to explain cancer and chemotherapy, try the above approach but better still: download the game and see what happens!
There are more children cancer games out there that I will present in a next post.
If you don’t have a blog: go wear pink! Ok, don’t change your complete office wear in pink, but wear a pink belt, pink jewelry, anything pink.
