Play "Free Rice" and feed the world

About three years ago, one student in an upper division course asked me whether she could share with the class about an exciting and humanitarian game on the web.  I said yes because, more than anything, I was curious myself.

She then told us about freerice.com. It was fantastic when a meeting or two after that, another student informed the class that she tried it over the weekend and donated a lot of rice.  A few months ago I ran into the student who brought this up.  She smiled and said "Dr. Khe, I still play freerice."

Such joys are the immeasurable benefits in being in this wonderful teaching profession ...

It is a vocabulary game, where the more the guesses are correct, the tougher the subsequent questions (words) become.  And the donated rice amount also goes up. 

Freerice.com challenges people to find the correct meaning of a word from four alternatives.
For every correct answer given, 10 grains of rice are donated to countries such as Uganda and Bangladesh.

 One might think that the grains of rice aren't much. But, yes, they quickly add up:

To date it has raised enough rice to feed more than four million people for a day.

Am reminded of the old saying that "little drops of water make a mighty ocean."

The game has a new updated version (which loads a tad too slowly now!)  The good thing is that it is now in Facebook as well. So, all those "Farmville" players can contribute rice too :)

The site's latest campaign comes with the launch of a new version of Free Rice (2.0) that aims to integrate game play with social media such as Facebook and Twitter in an attempt to drive up the site's popularity and attract new players.

What? you are still here? what are you waiting for? Go play Free Rice and make those contributions at somebody else's expense, and then make yourself a wonderful rice pilaf :)