Gaming for Rice

This morning I came (via Fast Company) across Free Rice a great online game:

that allows you become a little bit smarter while also doing the world some good. Created in October 2007 by computer programmer John Breen, who wanted to help his son study for the SAT, Free Rice was initially just a vocabulary game. Now, it has expanded to include math, science, geography and other subject areas and is even used as a learning tool in classrooms – apart from being an effective procrastination device at work.

It works like this: users are given one question and four different answer choices. For every correct answer, sponsors (who advertise at the bottom of every page) donate 20 grains of rice to feed the world’s hungry through the World Food Program. With very little promotion on the part of the WFP, the game has gone viral – it has about 40,000 users a day and so far can be credited with purchasing enough rice to feed 2.5 million people for a day – in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Uganda, Cambodia, Bhutan and Nepal.

While my maths skills predictably didn’t yield many grains, my history of art know-how did: between waking up and having breakfast, I collected 1000 grains of rice! Try it yourself. It really is fun.