Designing Accessible Trauma Relief Tools for Post-Disaster, Low-Resource Settings

Designing meaningful engagement for a classroom is one challenge. Designing for a village three days after a massive flash flood, with facilitators arriving on short notice and no guarantee of a quiet space to work, is another.

Alam Santi's Ecogames' Play for Care Facilitation Guide, developed as part of the 2026 response to flash flooding and landslides in Aceh Tamiang, offers a working example of what education design for unpredictable conditions looks like in practice.

The starting constraint shaped everything else: children process trauma through experience rather than words, so any tool built for this setting needed to work without relying on verbal processing or a fixed script. That ruled out anything that looked or felt like formal instruction, and pointed instead toward drawing, storytelling, and observation-based play.

From there, three design principles held the toolkit together.

First, low-resource. Every tool needed to work with minimal setup and with materials that could survive transport and repeated use in the field. This setting favored colouring pencils, activity sheets, and simple card and cube-based games rather than anything requiring power, screens or fragile components.

Second, facilitator-led but child-paced. While facilitators received training in trauma-sensitive engagement, the tools themselves were also built to invite children to opt in and disengage on their own terms rather than following a fixed game play sequence. For example, MuZe Cubes, a storytelling tool using image prompts on dice, gave children a way to participate at whatever level felt comfortable, from simply naming what they saw to constructing a full story.

Third, modular. Sessions in Aceh ranged from dedicated hour-long play sessions to brief activities layered into other relief work happening at the same time. The toolkit needed to flex to a variety of scenarios without losing its trauma-sensitive core, so that facilitators could select and combine activities in real time based on the group in front of them rather than work through a rigid programme.

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The result held up under difficult conditions. Facilitators delivered sessions in the rain, in villages already in the middle of demanding days, and with shifting group sizes and ages from two to thirteen in the same room. What made that possible wasn't a single clever tool, but a toolkit designed from the outset to work with unpredictability rather than against it.

Ecogames' broader work reflects this same design thinking. We build educational tools and resources that are durable and flexible enough to hold up wherever they're actually used, not just in ideal conditions.

If you're planning education or psychosocial support work in a disaster response or other low-resource setting, get in touch to talk through what a toolkit designed for those conditions could look like. We look forward to collaborating with you.