By DELANEE BOGAN
With the click of a mouse, one’s face instantly brightens knowing that one question answered correctly help fight world hunger.
Freerice.com, charitii.com and Wetopia offer interactive games online that provide users the opportunity to fight hunger globally.
“It feels really good helping someone that is really in need of your help. It is nice to be able to do something so simple and help people who need it more than you,” sophomore Rebecca Carrigan said.
With every question answered correctly on Free Rice, it donates 10 grains of rice through the United Nations World Food Program to help end hunger on a global scale.
Free Rice has donated rice to Haiti, Cambodia and Bangladesh. The subjects on this website include humanities, geography, English, math, chemistry, language learning, science and SAT test preparation.
The site is beneficial to one studying a specific subject and acts as a way to review material. Since 2007, there have been over 95 billion grains of rice donated because of Free Rice, and the number continues to grow daily. These grains of rice have already fed millions of people.
Junior Christine Maloney learned about Free Rice in Key Club. Key Club have held meetings where members have the opportunity to go online so they could play the game. Maloney answered enough questions to donate 4,000 grains of rice in just one sitting.
“I love helping others in need. I have so many blessings and sometimes I feel like it’s my turn to give back. There are so many subjects, so many questions to be answered, and so much rice to be given,” Maloney said.
Free Rice is funded by sponsors whose names are featured on the bottom of the screen after each answer is answered correctly.
“In sixth grade my language arts teacher told us about Free Rice, so I tried it and have been playing it ever since. I feel good [helping others] because I’m making the world a better place,” freshman Mason Wood said.
Teachers are now encouraging students to play educational online games as a means to learn materials and to help less fortunate people.
English and Advanced Placement Art History teacher, Cheryl Race offers all of her students extra credit for playing Free Rice. Students print out their results as proof of donating. She encourages her AP Art History students to play games that match artists with their paintings. For English, she suggests English grammar, vocabulary and SAT test preparation.
“I view [helping the less fortunate] as a bonus, and I see it as a way of encouraging students to become more socially involved,” Race said.
Similar to Free Rice, charitii.com is a crossword-style game, which allows one to pick which charity to donate to. One can donate clean water to communities living in extreme poverty, give food to malnourished children and families, provide education for children around the world, or help protect the world’s rainforests.
Charitii.com is funded by individual sponsors and began August 2008. As the game progresses the difficulty of each question increases as well. Words that match each clue lose letters and become more challenging to answer the longer one plays.
There are over 10,000 puzzles, and more are constantly being added to the database daily. One can submit a puzzle to the charitii.com database. After evaluation and verification the puzzle can be published to the website’s data base for everyone to play.
“We get food so easily; people in other countries don’t have that opportunity. It is a struggle for them. [Playing games that help others] have made me really grateful. It is really simple. You can answer many questions in a short amount of time,” Carrigan said.
Wetopia on Facebook is an interactive game like FarmVille. It allows one to create a community with friends who are also logged on. The player builds houses and buildings to earn “love.” “Love” is used to send various items to charities. Wetopia allows one to choose between three different charities to send the items to.
Justin Bieber and Ellen DeGeneres are both helping spread awareness of this website that helps less fortunate children. They are raising awareness by tweeting, and Ellen DeGeneres often mentions the website on her show. Wetopia has already donated over 3,000 papaya trees to kids in Africa and over 400,000 hot meals. Wetopia is funded by Sojo Studios and private donors.
“[People wanting to play] should know that once you start playing you will probably be engulfed for a while; it is really entertaining,” Maloney said.