FreeRice is a non-profit website organization that donates rice to hungry people around the world (freerice.com). This website was created by John Breen in 2007. The website works with a question that will appear on your screen with four answers to choose from. If you choose the right answer the website will donate ten grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Programme. From there the United Nations World Food Programme will donate the rice to a country or group of people that are in need of food.

Did you know that: Hunger is the world’s biggest health risk? More people die from hunger every year than AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined; one in seven people worldwide go to bed hungry; one in four children from developing countries are underweight; and that there are more hungry people in the world than the population of the USA, Canada, and the European Union combined.

Another very cool thing that the United Nations World Food Programme does is they buy the rice from the country they are giving it to. This is to not only help the hungry people in these countries, but to also help their economy grow. The money to buy the rice is given to FreeRice from the ads on the side of the page.

The questions can be any of eighteen categories ranging from English vocabulary to pre-algebra to four different languages. You can also guess countries location and countries flags. Every category has different levels of intensity. As an example, English vocabulary has 60 levels where on level one you may come across the word “follow”, but on level 60 you may come across a word like “ludic”. However, no matter what level you are on you only can donate ten grains of rice per question.

Some examples of rice being donated from FreeRice are: in Uganda 66,000 school children were fed three meals a day for a week; in Bhutan 41,000 children were fed three meals a day for eight days; in Myanmar 750,000 people were fed three meals a day for three days after a cyclone hit there; and there are many more examples!

FreeRice decided they didn’t want to only help people in need; they also wanted to make people smarter while donating. This is the reason why they made their website an educational website also. Now people who play the game that don’t need the rice can also benefit from playing the game.

If you would like to help FreeRice donate rice to places all over the world, here are a few things that you can do to help. Of course, you could always go onto the website and play the game! That is the easiest way to help donate. Or, you could go onto the website and go to the shop. FreeRice has many different sweatshirts, shirts, hats, bags, and many other things with different FreeRice logos and cool colors. You could also just go onto the website and hit the donate button and donate as much money as you want. And last, you could do something with your school where kids can go onto the website and play FreeRice for an hour or so. Once the hour is up a fun thing to do is to total up all the rice the kids have donated and divide the total number by 19,200 (the number of grains it takes to feed one person for a whole day). Then you will have a total number of how many people you have fed for a whole day.

FreeRice is a great thing and I encourage you all to try it out!