http://www.freerice.com/ricebowl
Hi Everyone,
I wanted to share with you a project that we just announced here in Maine. The Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI) in partnership with the United Nations World Food Programme is hosting the first annual Rice Bowl at http://www.freerice.com/ricebowl. The Rice Bowl is built upon the freerice.com online game where students (or anyone) can answer vocabulary and other questions in order to donate rice to the World Food Programme. Each correct answer donates 10 grains to WFP paid for by advertising displayed on the site. It is adaptive, so answer questions correctly, and the questions get harder!
The Rice Bowl will take place during the week after the Super Bowl. There are two teams, and we invite you to join either team. The "Student" team is being sponsored by MLTI, but welcomes students and adults alike. Our opposition will be sponsored by an as-yet-to-be announced celebrity...we are hoping to make a public announcement this week. The Rice Bowl will be won by the team that donates more rice during the week of February 6-12.
In Maine, we have set up a Think Globally, Act Locally scenario. To Think Globally, we are rallying students and schools to join the team and to play online. On one level, the rice donated goes to help world hunger. It is also a simple play on "Think"...the game is an intellectual game. The Act Locally challenge is for schools to raise monetary donations to Maine's largest food bank organization, Good Shepherd Food-Bank that provides aid to across the state of Maine. Each registered school has a unique URL at GSFB's web site to collect donations, and school totals are maintained to see which school can raise the most money.
This grew from a 1-day event last year at MLTI's Annual Student Conference. We had 1000 kids together at the University of Maine, and for an hour we played freerice.com, video-conferenced with officials at our food bank and at the World Food Programme in Rome. In that hour, the kids raised 2.4 million grains of rice. We used a parallel site that freerice set up for us so we could isolate and track donations by just those students. That site persisted through this week and student continued to play and raise donations ranging from 200,000-1.2 million grains of rice each day since last May!!
This year's goal is to involve 100,000 students in Maine, and 1,000,000 students worldwide. Locally, we hope to raise $1,000,000 for our local food bank. We invite all of you to invite your schools to join us. Help us get 1,000,000 kids to play freerice.com during the Rice Bowl. Have them join our team (or our opposing team...). If you can, we'd love to see other schools in other communities work locally to help the hungry in their communities.
We've linked to a few curricular ideas connected to understanding hunger from our web site. We are also looking to expand on these ideas and collect more curriculum ideas. Next year, we'll grow the event with more curricular ideas, more players, maybe even playoff rounds that pit teams against each other that lead to the top two teams facing off in the final Rice Bowl!
Thanks!
Jeff
http://www.freerice.com/ricebowl
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