Categories: TECHNOLOGY

Grow Your Vocabulary and Feed the World with FreeRice.com

Recently, I became aware of a wonderful Web site that donates rice to poor and hungry people all over the world. www.FreeRice.com is a Web site that has a game with vocabulary words, and four choices to click on to match the word’s correct meaning. Click on the correct word, and FreeRice.com starts to tally grains of rice, 10 at a time, that translate into food donations through United Nations World Food Program. Small company logos at the bottom of the screen change with every word, and they represent the company that paid for the grains of rice you’ve just earned.

If you click on an incorrect word, it will show you the right word, and then you have another word to try. In the course of about 10 minutes, I earned over 1,000 grains of rice, and felt great about helping the cause! The words get harder with each set of five correctly-answered words. The vocabulary level goes down one for each time you get a word wrong. But there is no penalty for making a mistake. Plus, you start to find your vocabulary increasing as you learn words you never heard before while playing! The best part is watching the rice accumulate in the bowl.

FreeRice.com links to relevant websites for their cause, including their infomative sister site, www.poverty.com. Www.poverty.com is a moving site about world problems of poverty, hunger, disease, and solutions in progress. It is obvious that there is something that everyone can do to help the world. Playing the vocabulary game at www.freerice.com is only the start, but it’s a good start!

The most interesting thing about www.freerice.com is that it costs the player nothing, and benefits the player intellectually. It’s easy to get caught up in the game of clicking on the correct word, and trying again, while feeling your vocabulary increase every time! The more you play, the more you learn. You can constantly challenge yourself to get to the highest level you can (max is 50, but most people don’t get beyond 48), while watching the rice add up each time!

There really isn’t a downside to playing www.freerice.com. I think it is even motivational in other ways too. The more I play, the more I realize that I would like to do more. I find myself clicking on the links to www.poverty.com and the other recommended sites to read about other ways I can help. I think that if everyone started by playing the game, and moved on to doing more, we could really make a difference in the world.

I also was fascinated by the link on www.freerice.com that shows the visitor totals by day of the amount of rice donated, based only on the gameplay of the site visitors. I am happy to feel like I’ve made a difference. I hope that everyone with a computer gets on and tries it out.

The faq link is also great for helping the player understand how www.freerice.com is a legitimate means of fundraising for United Nations World Food Program, which goes toward stamping out hunger, and also helping hungry people to become self-sufficient.

As a teacher, I would also recommend this site to students. Building vocabulary can be beneficial in many ways, including improving reading and writing skills, speaking, comprehension, test scores, and personal knowledge. Add those benefits to the idea of helping feed the world’s hungry, and there is no downside. Now I’m trying to think of ways to get the word out about this website, to schools, religious organizations, colleges, and the media. I bet that teachers with access to computers in their classrooms could reward students with 15 minutes of play on the site, or even see what kind of class total they could achieve in a day, what vocabulary level their class could attain, and what kind of rice donation total is possible for their class in a day. It could be extended into a math activity by making a chart of players, time, rice and vocabulary totals in a week, and get the students to challenge themselves. In fact, it could even be motivational for students to play it at home and get their parents involved. Wow!

Help me pass the word along – play the game at www.freerice.com, blog about it, link to it, send this article to your children’s teachers, and email the link to your friends and family. Think of all the good it will do.