Ellis Middle School seventh grade language arts students fed the world’s hungry Tuesday by playing a Web game.

In just one school day, teacher Jill Rollie’s students raised 215,000 grains of rice.

In addition, the students expanded their vocabularies and increased their comprehension levels.

“Because this is only one day I don’t know if I could actually say how much of an impact it will have on their vocabulary skills,” Rollie said Tuesday. “But any kind of exposure to new words and especially the practice of learning them is bound to help.

“It seems world hunger is what is motivating them to play the Web game,” she said.

Rollie “stumbled across” the FreeRice Web site and turned it into a language arts learning experience as well as a social consciousness-raising experience Tuesday at Ellis Middle School

FreeRice is a non-profit Web site run by the United Nations World Food Program. A partner is the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

FreeRice has two goals: First, provide education to everyone for free; second, help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

This is made possible by the generosity of the sponsors who advertise on the site.

For each correct answer on the Web game, FreeRice donates 10 grains of rice to a world hunger organization.

The rice gamers donate makes a difference to the person who receives it. According to the United Nations, about 25,000 people die each day from hunger or hunger-related causes, most of them children.

Though 10 grains of rice may seem like a small amount, it is important to remember that while one individual is playing, so are thousands of other people at the same time. It is everyone together that makes the difference.

Thanks to web gamers, such as the Ellis Middle School language arts students, FreeRice has generated enough rice to feed millions of people since it started in October 2007.

The last group of language arts students visited the Ellis Middle School library Tuesday afternoon to play the Web game.

According to Heather Johnson, “I was aware of world hunger problems before, but I didn’t know what I could do to help fight it.”

Johnson liked the web game at first sight and encouraged her friends to play it, during their Easter spring break vacation last weekend.

Paige Sunderman said, “I just think it’s a fun game, and it’s very educational.”

The seventh-grader convinced her mother, Janet, to try the FreeRice Web game and her friends, too, during Easter spring break.

It also touched her conscience. “I learned we should be donating a lot more food to feed the hungry,” she said.

A side benefit to the game was the fact Rollie saw the seventh grade students gain valuable experience for this week’s MCA tests.

“It was a great opportunity for them to have exposure to (word isolation) situations, which is also used on standardized tests,” she said. “Increasing students’ vocabularies will lead to better comprehension.”

So popular was Rollie’s Web game learning experience, another Ellis Middle School seventh grade team plans to pursue it later this week.