If you ask around, I’m sure that you will find that most people have played bingo at some point in their lives. You’ll probably encounter a few folks who say that have never played the game, but the chances are that majority of them will in fact know how the game is played.
The classical game of bingo is played used bingo cards containing numbers (the numbers are normally placed in small squares, and these squares arranged in a five by five grid). Each player’s objective is to be the first to cross off a line of five items diagonally, horizontally or vertically on their card, but the numbers can only be crossed off when called out by the bingo caller. While the classical game remains popular with many people, themed versions of the game (using custom bingo cards) have also come into vogue in recent years. In themed versions of the game, instead of numbers, words or phrases are printed of the cards.
Perhaps the most popular themed versions of bingo are those relating to holidays, to be used on those occasions. For example a bingo card containing words like “Nativity” or “Sleigh” might be used at Christmas, and one containing words such as “Heart” or “Romance” on Valentine’s Day.
Another situation in which bingo is popular is in education. The game is well suited to English, foreign languages, history, geography, science and math lessons. Once again appropriately themed bingo cards should be used – in this case prepared in advance by the teacher. Teachers can also vary game play, for example, by in a French lesson by calling out words in French, and requiring students to find the corresponding English item printed on their bingo card (or vice-versa), or in a math lesson printing the bingo cards with math problems, and requiring students to write in the answers rather than simply cross off squares.
By: Sunil Tanna
Many teachers are looking for interesting ways to spice up their classes. The idea is that by making learning fun, students will pay more attention, progress faster, take in more initial, and recall more later – and many teacher’s experience suggests that this is indeed the case. One such idea is being used in many classrooms in introducing the game of bingo, since it is very easy to learn, and doesn’t require expensive materials. Indeed, bingo is now being used to help teach a wide variety of different school subjects, including not only math, but also English, reading, foreign languages, and even science, history and geography.
The simplest version of bingo for math classes is to play using bingo cards containing numbers chosen by the teacher. Each student is given one such card and told to mark off a square if it contains an answer to a math problem posed by the teacher. The teacher then calls out a series of math problems, and the students have to figure out the answers in order to play the game. This type of bingo can be used for practising addition, subtraction, multiplication (especially “times tables”), and division. It can also used for practising fractions and decimals as well as rounding – in this case, the teacher may call out something like “one fifth” and student be required to find the square containing “0.2″, or the teacher might call out “14.7 rounded to the nearest whole number”.
Another way to play math bingo is to use bingo cards with math problems. In this case, the teacher calls out the problem (or writes it on the board), and the students must find the matching problem on their card, solve it, and write in the correct answer. When everybody is ready, those students who figured out the correct answer, can mark off the corresponding square – those who didn’t, can’t.
In either case, the key requirements to play these games in class are of course the bingo cards containing the items that the teacher wants to use for that class. Obviously, preparing a set of bingo cards by hand for each student would be quite time consuming and a waste of the teacher’s class preparation time – so the best method to make the bingo cards is to use a computer and some bingo card maker software – that way the cards can be printed with very little time and effort.
By: Sunil Tanna
