I have always liked words. I try to read as much as possible, which is less than it used to be, since I am now the father of two very young boys. But, after playing http://freerice.com/, I realized how much I don't know. Freerice.com is the brainchild of John Breen, who, as the great piece by NPR notes, started out(and still works for) http://poverty.com/.
Here is a bit of the article. Play the game: it's fun and sends food to those who most need it. Then tell us at SG how you did.
"Breen said the idea came to him one day in his kitchen in Indiana. He was sitting with his two teenage sons, preparing the older for the SAT.
"The younger one made a mockery of the situation. He kept saying, 'he doesn't know this word, he doesn't know that word,'" Breen said. "So I decided to do something on the computer to help my son learn vocabulary words."
What Breen came up with was a word game that he thought others might like to play on the Internet. He was already operating the Web site Poverty.com to inform people about hunger. So, he merged the two, and FreeRice.com was born.
Here's how it works: Contestants are offered four definitions for a word; by clicking on the right definition, a donation of 20 grains of rice is made to the U.N. World Food Programme. The U.N. distributes the rice worldwide.
English teacher Michael Hughes puts the Web site up on a large interactive screen and uses the game to warm up his classes at Alice Deal Middle School in Washington, D.C.
Hughes' class raised 280 grains of Rice during a short session.
While that's hardly enough for a daily ration for a starving child abroad, it still adds up, said World Food Programme spokeswoman Jennifer Parmelee.
"FreeRice.com is up to more than 8.2 billion grains of rice, which is one heck of a lot of rice and more than enough to feed 325,000 people for the day," Parmelee said.
The Web site earns money from advertising and gives cash to the Word Food Programme. Some $100,000 has already gone to buy rice to feed survivors of a recent cyclone in Bangladesh.
2 comments:
It won't make you smarter, but The Hunger Site (www.thehungersite.com) does much a similar thing... you can go there once per day (from a given computer) and click on a button, and each click buys X number of cups of food. The food is paid for by the sponsors (which include Mercy Corps and similar groups).
There are also sites on the same principle for supporting rainforests, literacy, mammograms for poor women, animal rescue, etc., and the umbrella organization also sells merchandise from fair-trade coffee to crafts, with the proceeds going to charity.
Thanks for the heads up launchpad. Thanks daddy dan too. I was sent this a little while ago and it is fun while donations are made.
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