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
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
