Fortunately the World Food Programme person overseeing FreeRice liked the idea as well, and after the idea traveled through the required channels at WFP, it was adopted. Using WFP's site and related links for much of my content, I developed 340 multiple-choice questions. WFP then thoroughly reviewed these questions for relevance, appropriateness and accuracy, eventually reducing the list to the current 285 questions.
For each correct answer playing FreeRice the bowl fills with rice to be donated to the World Food Programme. (author's photo)
When you created the section did you learn some things that surprised you about global hunger?
The questions I developed were of four basic types: definitions of terms related to world hunger; geographic information (countries and regions vis-a-vis world hunger); numbers showing the breadth and depth of world hunger; and lists (e.g., 5 causes of hunger, 10 top causes of death by disease, #1 cause of mental retardation and brain damage worldwide). The content of the numbers questions was most surprising: I had no idea of the seriousness of the issue, the extent of world hunger. These numbers brought into sharp focus the close correlation between hunger and other factors such as poverty, population, infant mortality, life expectancy. In fact, these questions were very difficult to write, as the information was shocking – and I wanted the player answering the question to be shocked by their new learning, so the correct multiple choice answer was often the most outrageous one. These questions are easy to answer: just choose the most shocking answer.
How do you recommend teachers utilize the global hunger subject in their classes?
Obviously, there are few, if any, courses in World Hunger in pre-collegiate public education. It is not a subject in the standard curriculum. And yet it is an issue central to the human experience, and as such it touches many parts of that curriculum. Any subject relating to people and how they live relates to world hunger: social studies, of course, but also English, other languages (as they expose students to other cultures), science (biological, chemical and physical aspects of hunger). And math, as a tool for opening understanding via numbers, can certainly be applied to the topic of world hunger. So, the subject of world hunger can be a central theme that unites diverse curricular areas.
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