The game as an educative pretext: educate and educate oneself in a health formation program

This article is focused on a game-based educative experience, developed with students of the 1st year of the Medicine program of a federal public educational institution. The game was used as a privileged strategy to approach the students' communication, spontaneity and sensitiveness in the health education process. Through this game, it was possible to approach the theme "the students' mental health", where they could express their feelings as freshman students in the Medicine program. Such experience triggered learning opportunities for students and teachers, what, from Freire's perspective, is seen as a dialogic process of mutual formation with students. Its development favored the rethinking about the teaching practice in health, as well as subsidized the reorientation of the process of preventing and promoting mental health by means of proposals and supporting programs to students enrolled at the institution.