Free Rice Online Game

Free Rice is a free basic drill trivia game where players can choose to answer trivia questions from a variety of topics ranging from English (or Spanish, Italian, German and French) vocabulary to chemistry symbols, famous painters and their works, or multiplication tables. For each question that the player gets right, the website donates 10 grains of rice to hungry people through the World Food Programme. You can play casually by just going to the website http://www.freerice.com/ or you can choose to log in, which allows you to track your record with the game and create groups. There are even leaderboards available through the Rice link on the top of the page, allowing you to see the top players and the number of grains of rice they have donated.

As a game, I can't say that Free Rice was extremely captivating to me. After trying a few different subjects, I still found myself essentially answering online quiz questions for a variety of subjects by clicking the correct multiple choice answer. If you answer a question wrong, the game gives you the answer and the question nearly always comes up again after a few questions.The element that makes Free Rice into more than any other trivia-style game is absolutely the fact that with each correct answer, you are doing some measurable good by donating food to needy people. While the donation is only 10 grains per answer, as you answer questions you can see the level of rice in your bowl grow and that really does become addictive.  I continually found myself thinking that this game wasn't much different than just answering review questions--except that I was not preparing for any quiz, and I kept answering questions until about 300 grains of rice after I had decided this game wasn't helping me learn anything new. Actually, I switched the category to Spanish vocabulary (I haven't taken a Spanish class in about 12 years) to give myself a little more of a challenge, and kept going!

Overall, Free Rice is an extremely simple trivia game with the added element of donating food to hungry people. The trivia portion of the game may help some, but there isn't any way to customize which questions appear beyond selecting a category, which may still have broader questions than you need. For example, if you're trying to prepare students for a vocabulary quiz, you have no way to make sure the game asks about specific vocabulary words. With a more limited set like chemistry symbols or multiplication tables I could see the drill feature of this game having more of an application.

To make the best use out of Free Rice, I think an instructor would need to focus some portion of the lesson around the feature of donating food. You could have the class do research about how much rice the class would need to donate to feed a family or about some of the countries where the rice could be donated to and their situations. Alternatively, you could use Free Rice to learn about teamwork and the difference that a team can make as opposed to an individual, by creating a group and examining the totals. For teaching about generosity and good citizenship, you could use this game as one example of the diverse ways that people can help others, and even do some research about how Free Rice was created or who sponsors them. While you could always have the freedom simply to use Free Rice as a trivia game to test student knowledge of specific facts, I think that using it in this way would add very little educational value and would really miss on the biggest potential of the game. Free Rice could potentially be used for any age group, although the trivia questions are largely focused towards subjects that would be taught in K-12 classes.