FreeRice (also stylized Freerice and Free Rice) is a non-profit click-to-donate website where visitors can answer questions and send grains of rice to the less fortunate around the world.
Questions are available on a variety of subjects, ranging from basic ones such as English grammar and the multiplication table to more advanced categories, including German and Italian.[1] Grains are paid for via sponsored advertisements that appear beneath questions after players provide a correct answer and the profits made are donated to the World Food Programme.
Although users are not required to create an account to participate, signing up allows them to track their total amount of rice donated, join groups and add others as friends.
History
FreeRice was founded on 2007-10-07 by computer programmer John Breen[2] partly as a method to assist his son with studying for the SAT.[3] The website quickly soared in popularity, becoming the most visited humanitarian website for the November 11-17 week and users donating more than 2.5 billion grains of rice within its first two months.[4] Although the amount of grains donated per question has been ten throughout most of FreeRice's existence, it was briefly doubled to twenty in 2008 before being reverted back in January 2009 due to a global financial crisis around the time.[5]
Breen handed ownership of FreeRice directly over to the World Food Programme in March 2009, hoping it could further grow under their care.[6] A slight modification of the game, dubbed "2.0", launched in September 2010, introducing support for accounts, groups, posting to social networks and achievements.[7] Multiple sub-domains were added in 2011 that offered translated versions of the website in several languages, including Spanish, Chinese and French among others.
Team Jiggmin
Main Article: Team_Jiggmin#FreeRice
Members of Jiggmin's Village created a FreeRice group in 2011 titled "Team Jiggmin" after their Folding at Home team. As of 2016-11-19 Team Jiggmin is ranked 31 in total amount of raised rice and has donated 33,940,070 grains.[8][9]
References
- ↑ http://freerice.com/category
- ↑ http://freerice.com/about
- ↑ https://www.wired.com/2010/03/free-rice-expands-your-word-power-and-feeds-the-hungry/
- ↑ http://web.archive.org/web/20090212162420/http://www.wfp.org/english/?ModuleID=137&Key=2695
- ↑ http://freerice.com/about/faq
- ↑ http://freerice.com/about/faq
- ↑ http://web.archive.org/web/20101016124625/http://www.freerice.com/
- ↑ http://freerice.com/content-group/team-jiggmin
- ↑ http://freerice.com/groups?page=2