Kids Can Learn and Give at FreeRice.com

Posted by Susan Carney Mar 24, 2009

It’s rare that kids can combine education in service in a simple and fun way. Yet that’s exactly what free rice does. What is FreeRice? It’s an ingenious non profit website kids (and adults) can visit to answer questions on a variety of topics. For every correct answer they get, ten grains of rice are donated by the sites sponsors to the UN World Food Program. Kids can opt to answer questions in a variety of topics (such as English, geography, chemistry, math, and art) and can keep a running tally of how much rice their answers have helped to donate.

According to the FreeRice site, 25,000 people die each day from hunger related causes. A meal provided in a country where rice is a staple part of the diet would include about 400 grams of rice (in addition to some other stuff). There are 48 grains of rice in a gram, so that means that 19,200 grains of rice are needed to feed one person for a day. That may seem like a lot at 10 grains a pop, but FreeRice is a group effort. In the year ands a half since FreeRice started, over 60 billion grains of rice have been donated.

Kids who are interested in learning more about world hunger and efforts to combat is can check out the UN World Food Program website. And be careful, because seeing those rice grains add up in your bowl as you answer questions on FreeRice can become addictive!