Today I was talking with a friend who is a 4th grade teacher at a charter school in Sacramento. He told me about his idea for a web site where his students could complete math problems and earn money for global development initiatives. I think it's a good idea - give students an incentive to practice math problems and teach them about global development issues at the same time - while giving them a way to do something about it, though very minor.
He got the idea from http://www.freerice.com/ , which donates rice when people answer vocabulary questions correctly. The site is advertising-supported.
I mentioned that the Gates Foundation supports initiatives in both education and global development and they could look at this as a way to create value using existing resources and funding commitments. They could say that they'll be giving a nickel for each question answered correctly, when they're actually going to give anyways. He would to see a scenario that provides an additional increment in funding when each question is answered. I think this would result in a lower donation per question, but is more honest in that answering the question correctly actually creates the incremental donation.
I'm interested in hearing what the class thinks about this idea.
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Juan:
I think this could be a very valuable teaching opportunity, but only if the teacher/website can make the task something that students can relate to, is relevant to the given curriculum, and is continually interesting.
A teacher at my old school incorporated some of these concepts into her lessons. She offered to donate a quarter to a local community center for every additional math practice sheet that the students did. Unfortunately, she found that her sixth grade students needed some incentive to participate b/c they did not realize that the money supported things they regularly participated in. Without that personal connection, it made it tougher to invest them in doing more math, a subject students tend to loathe in general.
Additionally, the teacher should be able to use the website as a supplement to their curriculum. If one could design a website like the one your friend talked about and provide the teacher with feedback about the student's performance, that would be awesome!
Chris
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