Today’s teachers are no longer satisfied with rote learning and boring classroom activities. As a result, fun, engaging and challenging educational activities are very much in demand, and one such activity that has become extremely popular in recent years is bingo. This is because bingo is ideally suited to educational environments – apart from being enjoyable, it’s very easy to play, it’s extremely flexible and adaptable, and it doesn’t require lots of expensive materials or specialist resources.
The traditional version of bingo is played using bingo cards containing a 5 X 5 array of numbers. Each players goal is to try to get a line (horizontal, vertical or diagonal) of items marked off their card – they mark off items as they are called out by the bingo caller. Educational versions of bingo use broadly the same rules (although teachers may of course vary the rules if they wish), but the bingo cards are instead printed with items specific to the particular subject or lesson – for example, place names in a geography class, historical figures in a history class, authors or book titles in an English literature class, and so on.
While it is true that bingo is can be used in many different subjects, one subject where it has proven especially popular with teachers is math. Usually math teachers will use bingo cards containing math problems, and ask the students to write in answers to these questions (as the questions are called out), but that isn’t the only way to play. You could use bingo cards containing numbers which serve as the solutions to various math questions – when the teacher calls out a math question, students must mark off the square containing the solution. Another idea when teaching fractions and/or decimals is to have cards containing the same number written in different ways – when a teach calls out “a half”, students may tick off a square containing 0.5, 2/4, 3/6, 4/8 or any other other representation of a half, regardless of format or base.
If you’re a teacher and want to use bingo in your classes, then obviously you’ll need to get the appropriate bingo cards. There are specialist publisher who offer preprinted materials, but these are sometimes expensive and also limit your choice of items and themes to those chosen by the publisher. It would be a lot more flexible if you could print the cards yourself – and installing some bingo card maker software on your PC will allow you to do exactly that.
By: Sunil Tanna
Bingo is an increasingly popular activity with teachers looking for interesting, challenging, and fun activities to use as teaching aids in their classrooms. There are many reasons why this is happening, but underlying all of them is the fact that teachers are recognizing the suitability of bingo to educational environments. For example, teachers know that bingo is not only easy for students to learn (and fun for them to play), but they also can see the game can be easily adapted to different subjects or lesson plans, and that it can be played using ordinary inexpensive materials.
Pretty much all educational variants of bingo are played using special custom bingo cards. These cards are printed with items specific to the subject of the lesson being taught, rather than the usual numbers, so for example, in an English class, the items might be words that students are learning to read, in a science class, the items might be names of chemicals or elements, and in a geography class, the items might be names of cities, states or countries.
Bingo is particularly suitable for use in math classes; this is because there are a variety of ways to play the game. For example, the bingo cards might be printed with math problems, and students must write in the (correct) answers rather than simply mark items from their cards. Or the cards might contain numbers, and when the teacher calls out a problem, the student must find the corresponding number. Or when teaching fractions, the same number might be presented in different ways (e.g. 3/6 versus 2/4 versus 1/2), and students might be required to solve this type of conversion problem in order to get an item marked off their card.
For all the different educational versions of bingo, the main thing that teachers need is suitable bingo cards. The best way to get them is to print them from your computer – get some bingo card generator software, and it becomes very easy to generate as many as you want. This is much better and cheaper than buying preprinted bingo cards, because you can use the software again and again, and you can also customize the cards’ content to your heart’s content.
By: Sunil Tanna
