::A Geek in Korea::

If I was going to recommend any game to students to help them increase their word power and make the world a better place at the same time, the only thing I would tell them to play would be Freerice.com.

The concept behind Freerice.com is simple. Use the banner ads of players to pay for 20 grains of rice for every correct answer to a vocabulary game. For every third answer you get correct, you increase your level and difficulty. For every word you get wrong, you decrease your level. The entire time you play, you are slowly building up your bowl of rice. Altruism that is benefited by self-improvement. That’s brilliant!

The useful part of this game is the scaling of difficulty. While my coworkers and I can struggle to break into the forty level range, if you do poorly on the first batch of words, you get easier vocabulary to study. This means that it benefits students as well as teachers. This slowly increases as you go up levels. This is like the student’s vocabulary tests on steroids, but it helps people for every correct answer. That’s certainly a wonderful incentive to try to get a correct answer.

The pronunciation of the word is even given in addition to the correct answer after every guess. There is no timer, so they can go as slowly as they need to find the answer. Students can learn a new word, learn how to say it, then have to choose the correct answer. They can use word roots, use dictionaries, translate, or anything they need to get the correct answer. All I care about is the results. Higher level vocabulary scores, and lots of donated rice.

I gave students homework. They have to play the game and achieve a certain level. Then they have to print out a screen shot proving they got to at least the right level. I might even make it a class wide, or even school wide competition to see who can donate the most rice as well as who can get to the highest level.

The students were really enthusiastic about the game because they knew that by playing the game they were helping someone else get food. 20 grains of rice per correct answer isn’t very much, but when I showed them the world wide totals for everyone playing the game, they were blown away by the amount of food that had been donated by people learning English at the same time.

What parent would kick their student off the computer if they knew they could learn English and help poor people at the same time? Only a heartless person would say no to that!