Wouldn’t it be great if you could help end world hunger by just spending a little time on the internet?

Well, you can – at Free Rice.

The entire site is built around a simple vocabulary game. It provides you with a word and four choices – you match the word to its synonym/definition.

As you play, it tracks each right answer you get – and for every right answer, the website donates 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program.

It sounds too good to be true, but it’s a great example of how the web works. Everything on the web can be monetized. Put an ad on a webpage, and each visitor is now a source of income. In this case, that income is being directly funneled into a great charity.

In this case, there is also a tremendous amount of traffic. His statistics show that they’ve donated over 10 billion grains of rice – which equals over 500,000,000 correct answers. That’s a lot of vocabulary.

I first read about the site on an education blog. A teacher was using it with his class (middle school kids, I think) as a warm-up exercise. Each day they’d answer a few questions.

As a teacher, this tool has a couple of great purposes. It can help our students learn vocabulary – important for life, for the HSPA, and for the SATs. It also helps raise awareness of a very real problem – world hunger.

And it helps kids learn that they can make a difference. Something as benign as playing a video game can send food to hungry children halfway across the world.

So spread the word about Free Rice. Answer a few questions yourself – it’s pretty fun.

This is such a great idea, I think I might look into making something similar in the next few months. He’s kind of cornered the market on vocab – so maybe I’ll make a math quiz program. Now I just to find another charity to donate too…

By the way, any math teachers that would find such a website useful and/or interesting – be sure to leave a comment with suggestions for functionality. I’m a Social Studies teacher, so I might not know best what a math student needs.