2008 Woodie Awards
Rice site feeds hungry, enriches mind
Paige Gabriel
Issue date: 3/27/08 Section: Editorial
Commentary By
Paige Gabriel
assistant news editor
College students have perfected procrastination to an art and I am no exception. My main problem with this habit is running out of things to do when I am putting off studying for an exam or not writing that essay that is due tomorrow morning.
Facebook and Myspace can only provide so many hours of entertainment before you can recite your friends' profiles from memory and Bored.com is not as exciting as it used to be in high school.
I stumbled across an interesting Web site, freerice.com, last week when I was not studying for a test. FreeRice is based on an interesting concept that combines word games and doing a good deed.
The site gives you a word and four options for what the word means. For every correct answer that you give, freerice.com donates 20 grains of rice to be given to hungry people through the United Nations World Food Program.
To the left of the questions is a picture of a wooden bowl. With each question you answer correctly, twenty more grains of rice are put into the bowl.
The bowl is emptied into a small pile every time you earn 100 grains of rice.
These piles are combined into one large pile every time you earn 1,000 rains of rice.
A special message is displayed under your bowl once you have earned ten piles of 1,000.
FreeRice allows players to decide whether they want to restart their donation count every time they begin playing the vocabulary game or if they want to keep a lifetime tally of how many grains of rice have been donated by people playing on that computer.
The program adjusts itself to the player's vocabulary level.
Some of the words in the program's database range from "ill," "destroy," "employee" and "little" at the lower levels to "vouchsafe," "anatropous," "girandole" and "autophytic" at the highest levels. There are 55 levels in all.
What sets the FreeRice program apart from word games on Yahoo! and other sites is the added element of your answer determining whether or not twenty grains of rice are donated.
Paige Gabriel
assistant news editor
College students have perfected procrastination to an art and I am no exception. My main problem with this habit is running out of things to do when I am putting off studying for an exam or not writing that essay that is due tomorrow morning.
Facebook and Myspace can only provide so many hours of entertainment before you can recite your friends' profiles from memory and Bored.com is not as exciting as it used to be in high school.
I stumbled across an interesting Web site, freerice.com, last week when I was not studying for a test. FreeRice is based on an interesting concept that combines word games and doing a good deed.
The site gives you a word and four options for what the word means. For every correct answer that you give, freerice.com donates 20 grains of rice to be given to hungry people through the United Nations World Food Program.
To the left of the questions is a picture of a wooden bowl. With each question you answer correctly, twenty more grains of rice are put into the bowl.
The bowl is emptied into a small pile every time you earn 100 grains of rice.
These piles are combined into one large pile every time you earn 1,000 rains of rice.
A special message is displayed under your bowl once you have earned ten piles of 1,000.
FreeRice allows players to decide whether they want to restart their donation count every time they begin playing the vocabulary game or if they want to keep a lifetime tally of how many grains of rice have been donated by people playing on that computer.
The program adjusts itself to the player's vocabulary level.
Some of the words in the program's database range from "ill," "destroy," "employee" and "little" at the lower levels to "vouchsafe," "anatropous," "girandole" and "autophytic" at the highest levels. There are 55 levels in all.
What sets the FreeRice program apart from word games on Yahoo! and other sites is the added element of your answer determining whether or not twenty grains of rice are donated.
