Ocean Education in Papua with Biosphere Foundation's Mir Vessel

In March 2022, the crew of Biosphere Foundation's sailing vessel Mir set out on their Coral Triangle Voyages, bringing environmental education to coastal communities around Raja Ampat, Papua. Alongside their own programmes, they used two games designed by Ecogames, Operation Ocean and Alami Seaside, to bring marine conservation learning directly to schools and children along the coastline.

Biosphere Foundation, a US-registered non-profit founded in 1991, works on nature stewardship and environmental education from its headquarters in North West Bali. Mir itself is a 113-foot sailing vessel, once used to train women at sea, now rebuilt to carry conservation and education work between island communities across the Coral Triangle. For coastal schools that rarely see outside visitors, a wooden ship arriving with games, books and a crew ready to teach is already an event in itself, well before a single lesson begins.

Operation Ocean: a classroom built around a game board

Operation Ocean was used in schools across Raja Ampat to introduce students to ocean ecosystems and the impact of human activity on marine health. Its scale and hands-on format made it well suited to classroom use: students crowded around the same board, moving pieces, making decisions together, and working through conservation concepts as a shared, physical experience rather than something read off a page. In practice, that means a room full of uniformed students leaning over a game board on the classroom floor, more engaged than a standard lesson could manage on its own.

Alami Seaside: the coastline as the classroom

Alami Seaside took a different approach, using prompt cards to guide children through their own coastal surroundings. Rather than a classroom exercise, it turned the coastline itself into the learning space, sending children out with sand and shoreline as their material, helping them identify local species and understand the ecological role of an environment they already knew, just not always in scientific terms.

A partnership that outlasted the first voyage

Since that first voyage, the partnership has continued. Biosphere Foundation still uses Operation Ocean and Alami Seaside regularly for outreach with children, both around their headquarters in North West Bali and during voyages at sea, making the games a recurring part of how the foundation reaches young people in the communities it works with. Children on Raja Ampat's beaches today are still playing the same games that first came ashore in 2022, a sign that the material held up well beyond a single visit.

That kind of ongoing use is exactly what Ecogames' games are designed for: not a one-off activity, but tools durable and flexible enough to support education work over years, on land or at sea. It's the same principle behind Alam Santi's broader education work, building tools and curricula that hold up well beyond a single session, whether that session happens in a fixed classroom or on the deck of a sailing vessel three hours from the nearest port.

If your organisation is looking for education tools that can travel and hold up to repeated use in the field, get in touch to talk through what Alam Santi's Ecogames team could offer.