Happy Birthday Freerice

The wonderful, clever, Freerice is celebrating its fifth Birthday. Freerice is one of my absolute favourite things. You answer a series of questions and each one you get correct leads to ten grains of rice being donated to the United Nations World Food Programme. Ten grains may not seem like a lot but it soon adds up: over the last five years 100 billion grains of rice have been donated to feed 5 million people.

When John Breen created Freerice to give his children a tool for studying for their college entrance exams, he also wanted to make sure his kids understood the importance of giving back. By donating Freerice to the World Food Programme, he’s made it possible for countless others to get involved in the fight against hunger. All of my family play Freerice on a regular basis (we have our own group so we can work together to see how much we raise).

One of the great things about Freerice is that all you have to do is answer questions and learn. The rice is donated by external sponsors, you don’t do any fundraising of your own. The system is structured cleverly so that it is a learning experience. Get a question wrong and you drop a level and the question will be asked again later: so over time you do learn. We’ve found Freerice especially good for vocabulary, in English and in French; although my kids also like the geography questions.

So Happy Birthday to an amazingly worthy social learning application. May you have many, many more.

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