Promoting language and global citizenship 10 grains of rice at a time
Community Review for Free Rice
My Take
At first glance, this seemed like a fairly basic 'game' that had a fairly short shelf life. How wrong I was!
Free Rice hooks students in multiple ways. It is a game; it's not considered 'learning' by many students. It has a win/lose outcome and a method of tracking score (via grains of rice). Lastly, it has a feel-good factor; students can take pride in the fact that they are helping those less fortunate.
For teachers there is the added bonus of increasing or decreasing difficulty levels according to class ability and progress, as well as many informative links that help students to become aware of events in the wider world around them.
Although there are dozens of topics to quiz students on, the main limitation is that the website doesn't seem to allow teachers to tailor questions to their needs and learning goals.
How I Use It
I use this as a supplemental learning tool in my English classes. I love the fact that I can amp up the difficulty for my seniors, while still being able to help my lower ability classes find success.
The 'groups' feature allows you to track your grains of rice over time. My students loved seeing the number rack up over the course of a semester! In a smaller class students created their own profiles in order to compete against one another.
There are limits to what the site can do. It would be great to be able to create your own questions/vocab choices to coincide with a unit in order to reinforce specific learning goals.