Good teachers are always on the look-out for engaging, interesting and fun educational activities to use in their classes. One such activity that is growing in popularity, is bingo. The reasons for this, are that bingo is very easy to learn and play, adaptable to almost any type of lesson, subject or student age group, and is not requiring of expensive specialist materials. In short, it’s an ideal game for use in schools, colleges and other educational situations.
When bingo is played as an educational game, one of the main differences from traditional bingo is that a different style of bingo cards are used. In traditional bingo, bingo cards containing a 5 X 5 grid of numbers are used. However, in educational versions of bingo, each item on the grid is an item specific to the subject being taught – for example the name of a country, city, mountain or river in a geography class, or the names of different plants or animals in a biology class, and so on. Bingo is suitable for use in a range of subjects across the entire curriculum, but is a particular favorite among math teachers. The most common way to play the game is to use bingo cards containing math questions – students must write in the answers to questions that come up, rather than simply tick off squares, but there are other variations too. Another idea is to use bingo cards containing numbers, and in this case, the teacher calls out math problems (or writes them on the blackboard), and the students must mark off the number which is the solution to the problem.
There’s no limit on the kinds of math classes which bingo can be used for. It’s probably fair to say that it’s most popular as a tool for encouraging practice of basic arithmetic, especially multiplication and multiplication tables. That’s not bingo’s only use though! Another popular activity is bingo using fractions or decimals – in this version students may be required to convert between different representations of the same number (e.g. marking off any of 1/2, 2/4, 3/6, 4/8, or 0.5, if the teacher calls “a half”).
To play fraction bingo, or in fact any other educational version of bingo, you will of course need the appropriate special bingo cards. Once upon a time, it wasn’t possible to get cards customized to your exact requirements, and the closest thing was preprinted cards from a specialist publisher (which were also often quite expensive). Today however you can simply print bingo cards using your computer – download some bingo card creator software, and it’s a simple job to printed as many cards as you want, whenever you want.
By: Sunil Tanna
While it’s certainly true that there are some people who enjoy playing bingo much more than others, it’s probably also true that most of us have played bingo at some point in our lives. Furthermore, while there are some people who have never actually played the game, I bet if you asked them, most of them would know how to play the game.
With bingo being so universally popular, it’s not really very surprising that there many different variants of the rules, as well as adaptations of the game intended for different circumstances and playing situations. The traditional game of bingo is of course played using bingo cards containing a grid of squares, each square containing a number, and the players’ objective is to be the first person to mark off a line (horizontal, vertical or diagonal) of squares on their card.
There are many ways that game play can be modified, the simplest of which is to change the winning criterion. For example, instead of requiring a single line, players may be required to get two separate lines, a postage stamp shape, all border squares of the card, or even mark off every single square.
More sophisticated variants involve replacing the numbers with other items, such as words, phrases, dates, times, or even math problems. Bingo games using holiday-related words and phrases are popular around holidays like Christmas, Easter, Halloween or July 4th, and other themed versions are very popular in education, including ESL (English as a Second Language) and K-12. One such example of educational variant of bingo is math bingo: cards are printed with math problems, and students must write in the answers to questions (when they question is called out) rather than simply cross off squares.
In order to play themed variants of bingo, you will of course need bingo cards containing the appropriate special items. It can be difficult and expensive to purchase themed bingo cards, and it’s incredibly time consuming to create the manually. The best answer is to get your computer to do the job – with the help of bingo card maker software, it really is very simple to printed unlimited quantities of bingo cards on any topic that you might want.
By: Sunil Tanna
