Feed the world with your brain! Vocabulary words = rice donations
Gacked from josan and two RL friends: this is the newest way to use all that book-learning to do good.
http://www.freerice.com/index.php
The advertisers on the FreeRice vocabulary-building web site will donate 10 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program for each vocabulary word you get right.
It's fun, it's a pretty little website, and it feeds the world -- with your brain! This is too fun to pass up.
I'm staying at my sister's and got my nephew playing this as soon as he came home from school. It got him off my laptop, LOL, and he's going like blazes... fortnight, he knows. Totalitarianism he can't pronounce, but could still figure out means 'absolutism.' Vindictive he gets. Plethora he mispronounces, and misses. Then he gets a long string right: berate, renown, disdainful, tabard (all that Tolkien pays off!), mutton, diagram, porcine.
"Like Porco Rosso!" he says. It's his new favorite movie. We watched it the first night I came to stay with him; his mom is at the NCA.
"Motile, brouhaha, egoistic." He's having trouble pronouncing these, but works out their correct answers. "Humbug, vitality, cobbler, spree, aspiration, archetype, perspicacious, relic."
"I'm at level 24 again," he says, after missing several words. The program drops to an easier level each time you miss a word, then when you get three in a row correct, it goes up one level. The highest level is 50. The program keeps track of how many people get each word right or wrong, and then adjusts each word’s difficulty level accordingly.
"1,070 grains of rice already," Gavin announces proudly. He looks over at me quickly, then goes back to the game, sounding out each word in turn. "Desperado, tyranny, accessible, pageantry, conform, antiquity, jostle." He's back to level 30 now.
"I mis-chose lactic," he turns to tell me, rolling his eyes. "I forgot - it's like lactose intolerance. I'm going to do this every day for, like, 10 minutes. That way I'll learn lots of words."
He decides he's going to show this to his class at their next show and tell. "We could get everybody doing it. We'd feed every hungry person in the world!" This is one computer game his teachers will probably like having the kids tell each other about.
I love my nephew Gavin :D
ETA:
A quick list of some of the level 49 and 50 words:
meretricious, ramose, hoy, chersonese, hispid, susurrant, saxicolous, gonfalon, cachou, geometrid, verruca, brocket, tenebrific, lanugo, exedra, parget, manege, videlicet, erose, nim, adscititious, mavis, incondite, pelage, lustrate, passible, indite, bombardon, affusion, hermeneutic, jaconet, crinite, bastinado, boeotian, hamartia, surah, tartuffe, tontine, gyve, mugwump, gallus, minatory, thrasonical, monad, exordium, anlage, birl, statice, lucubration, betise, cumshaw, doggo, collop, griot, bort, amphisbaena, alidade, falcate, pinchbeck, otiose, grig, furbelow, katzenjammer, swarf, weasand, ambsace, sapid, tsuris, davit, vatic, costa, luxate, bruxism, abseil, argil, entelechy
As josan said, if you're a Georgette Heyer fan, you'll see a lot of her favorite words. I see a lot that are familiar from classical languages and literature, English literature, botany, geography, zoology and ecology. There's the inevitable quirky words from fashion (chopine, jaconet). Medicine and especially anatomy. Deceptively short, rare words from early and medieval English, as well as a lot any Morte D'Arthur or Tolkien fan will know. Quite a few from rhetoric, the usual oddments from religion and philosophy, and a smattering of non-English and non-classical or Romance language words -- German, Arabic, Yiddish, Gaelic, Japanese...
We're also seriously taxing the freerice.com website! Hehe. This is good, no? It was down tonight for an hour or two. Well, when the literary-minded fen online start circulating the URL, what do you expect but a swarm of word- and world-loving women running up 10,000-grain rice bowls for the hungry of the world? There was a nearly 10% increase in donations today: 16 million more grains of rice bought by advertisers to feed the world. I wonder how much of that was online fen :D
Now if we could all buy kids in the developing world the incredible $100 XO computers, too:
http://www.laptopgiving.org/en/index.php
http://www.freerice.com/index.php
The advertisers on the FreeRice vocabulary-building web site will donate 10 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program for each vocabulary word you get right.
It's fun, it's a pretty little website, and it feeds the world -- with your brain! This is too fun to pass up.
I'm staying at my sister's and got my nephew playing this as soon as he came home from school. It got him off my laptop, LOL, and he's going like blazes... fortnight, he knows. Totalitarianism he can't pronounce, but could still figure out means 'absolutism.' Vindictive he gets. Plethora he mispronounces, and misses. Then he gets a long string right: berate, renown, disdainful, tabard (all that Tolkien pays off!), mutton, diagram, porcine.
"Like Porco Rosso!" he says. It's his new favorite movie. We watched it the first night I came to stay with him; his mom is at the NCA.
"Motile, brouhaha, egoistic." He's having trouble pronouncing these, but works out their correct answers. "Humbug, vitality, cobbler, spree, aspiration, archetype, perspicacious, relic."
"I'm at level 24 again," he says, after missing several words. The program drops to an easier level each time you miss a word, then when you get three in a row correct, it goes up one level. The highest level is 50. The program keeps track of how many people get each word right or wrong, and then adjusts each word’s difficulty level accordingly.
"1,070 grains of rice already," Gavin announces proudly. He looks over at me quickly, then goes back to the game, sounding out each word in turn. "Desperado, tyranny, accessible, pageantry, conform, antiquity, jostle." He's back to level 30 now.
"I mis-chose lactic," he turns to tell me, rolling his eyes. "I forgot - it's like lactose intolerance. I'm going to do this every day for, like, 10 minutes. That way I'll learn lots of words."
He decides he's going to show this to his class at their next show and tell. "We could get everybody doing it. We'd feed every hungry person in the world!" This is one computer game his teachers will probably like having the kids tell each other about.
I love my nephew Gavin :D
ETA:
A quick list of some of the level 49 and 50 words:
meretricious, ramose, hoy, chersonese, hispid, susurrant, saxicolous, gonfalon, cachou, geometrid, verruca, brocket, tenebrific, lanugo, exedra, parget, manege, videlicet, erose, nim, adscititious, mavis, incondite, pelage, lustrate, passible, indite, bombardon, affusion, hermeneutic, jaconet, crinite, bastinado, boeotian, hamartia, surah, tartuffe, tontine, gyve, mugwump, gallus, minatory, thrasonical, monad, exordium, anlage, birl, statice, lucubration, betise, cumshaw, doggo, collop, griot, bort, amphisbaena, alidade, falcate, pinchbeck, otiose, grig, furbelow, katzenjammer, swarf, weasand, ambsace, sapid, tsuris, davit, vatic, costa, luxate, bruxism, abseil, argil, entelechy
As josan said, if you're a Georgette Heyer fan, you'll see a lot of her favorite words. I see a lot that are familiar from classical languages and literature, English literature, botany, geography, zoology and ecology. There's the inevitable quirky words from fashion (chopine, jaconet). Medicine and especially anatomy. Deceptively short, rare words from early and medieval English, as well as a lot any Morte D'Arthur or Tolkien fan will know. Quite a few from rhetoric, the usual oddments from religion and philosophy, and a smattering of non-English and non-classical or Romance language words -- German, Arabic, Yiddish, Gaelic, Japanese...
We're also seriously taxing the freerice.com website! Hehe. This is good, no? It was down tonight for an hour or two. Well, when the literary-minded fen online start circulating the URL, what do you expect but a swarm of word- and world-loving women running up 10,000-grain rice bowls for the hungry of the world? There was a nearly 10% increase in donations today: 16 million more grains of rice bought by advertisers to feed the world. I wonder how much of that was online fen :D
Now if we could all buy kids in the developing world the incredible $100 XO computers, too:
http://www.laptopgiving.org/en/index.php