ONLINE GAME: Free Rice

Free Rice is a free, online game run by the United Nations World Food Program. It is a trivia game that rewards the player with 10 grains of rice for each question answered correctly. Then, the cumulative amount of rice in your bowl is donated to countries in need, paid for by the sponsors who advertise on the website. The trivia questions can be appropriate for children and teens because the levels start easy and progress to difficult with each right answer.

There are a variety of trivia questions that a player can choose from: the default is English vocabulary but you can change it by clicking the "subjects" button at the top of the page. Not all subjects are appropriate for all ages. Here is my assessment of which subjects may be appropriate for children and teens:

Subjects for all ages: English grammar, English vocabulary

Subjects for children (grade 6 or lower): basic math, multiplication table,

Subjects for teens (grade 7 and higher): famous paintings, chemical symbols, identifying countries, world capitals, French, German, Italian, Spanish

This game connects education with kindness. Children and teen players should know that their efforts are helping to feed people around the world. Links on the website provide more information about food programs.

The first step to becoming a gamer

My inspiration for this blog came during a session at the 2010 OLA Superconference. As would seem appropriate, the session was on gaming and the approaches that libraries can use for children and youth. I consider gaming to be a big hole on my resume so I'm going to go about improving my knowledge. Please follow along as I explore board games, card games, computer games and video games. Let me confess my gaming knowledge as of today so that other newbies will have something to relate to and pro-star gamers won't waste any more of their time on this blog: I have played traditional, adult board games (Monopology, Scattergories, Scrabble, etc.); I think the last computer software game I played was an early version of The Sims; online I am a sudoku addict; and I rocked the first Nintendo system but recently have only played Rock Band and Guitar Hero with my friends' consoles. In other words, I've got a long way to go if I want to be a knowledgeable gamer.
The gaming area is no longer a new frontier for public library programming but there are new games coming out all the time. So let's get started if we ever hope to catch up!