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Free Rice for ASTD Employee Learning Week
By Christine Martell | December 4, 2007
ASTD Employee Learning Week is Dec 3-7, 2007. To celebrate, BlogCascadia will be posting about different kinds of learning that span the range of our industry. You can learn more about the week at the Employee Learning Week website.
Learn vocabulary while earning rice
Here is an interesting approach to combining learning with supporting a cause. It’s a variation of those sites that ask you to visit and click on a link to fight breast cancer, or world hunger. The donations are provided by the companies that put their ads up on the site, and this one works that way too. But here is the difference, they are using learning to motivate you to go there.
You go to the Free Rice site and take a multiple choice vocabulary test. For each word you answer correctly, you donate 20 grains of rice though the United Nations. It feels more like a game than a test, if you get it right, the words get harder. If you answer incorrectly, they get easier. But they never get too easy. I intentionally answered incorrectly over and over to see how easy they would get, and they were still engaging. It appears to be very difficult to reach the highest levels.
I found it to be fun. And I was learning new words, and clarifying the meaning of others. It’s easy to pop over and answer a few words in between doing other things and it’s easy to justify the value of learning vocabulary.
What do you think? Is this an effective use of a learning game? Can you see it’s value? How could you use this approach in your organization?
Other posts on similar topics- ASTD Employee Learning Week Dec 3-7, 2007
- Employee Learning Week - more thoughts
- Other ideas for Employee Learning Week
- The ROI of Social Learning
- Back to Basics in the New Year
Topics: - Employee Learning Week |