Most people are familiar with the game of bingo, although, to be fair, many of us think of it only as a kids game or a game played by seniors at social events. While I wouldn’t want to deny that the game is played in these situations, bingo can be a lot of fun for people of all ages, and has also found use in classrooms as an educational tool.
The basic idea of bingo is that each player is given a bingo card. The card contains squares, within in each of which, is a randomly selected number. A bingo caller reads out numbers in a random order, and players mark off the corresponding squares on their cards. The objective of the game is to be the first player to achieve a winning combination of marked off squares – depending on the particular variant of bingo being played, this may for example be one or more straight lines going all the way across the bingo card.
One of the reasons why bingo can be adapted to different situations is that you don’t have to play using cards with numbers. Instead of numbers, bingo cards could be printed with words, phrases or even musical symbols. Thus the game can be adapted to different holiday themes such as Christmas, July 4th, New Year, or Halloween, to social events such as baby showers or wedding showers, to the classroom, by using bingo cards containing items chosen by the teacher, whether it be math problems (that the student must solve in order to mark them off), music symbols (that students must recognize), or even foreign language words (that students must translate).
To play a variant of bingo you will of course need to have special bingo cards with the items of your choice. You can create these by hand if you want to, but if you need a lot of bingo cards, it can be a lot of work. An easy solution is to use your computer – with the help of appropriate bingo card creator software, you just need to enter the list of words, phrases or items that you want, and the computer can generate the bingo cards for you with just a few mouse clicks.
By: Sunil Tanna
Most people are familiar with the game of bingo. We tend to think of it as a leisurely game mostly played by seniors, and while this is often the case, it is also the case that variations of the standard game are also used in teaching – including in K-12 education and in English as a Foreign/Second Language (usually abbreviated to “EFL” or “ESL”) classes. Additionally, games of bingo can also be a fun activity for social and family events such as wedding showers, baby showers, and family gatherings at holidays such as July 4th, Thanksgiving and Christmas.
As you probably know, standard games of bingo are played using bingo worksheets (also known as “bingo cards”) containing a selection of numbers – the bingo players’ goal is to find matching squares as numbers are called out by the bingo caller. In educational and holiday versions of bingo however, the game play is varied somewhat – the squares can contain letters, words or phrases appropriate to the particular game – for example, in a game of Christmas bingo, the squares might contain words such as “Santa Claus”, “Christmas Tree”, and “Magi”. Likewise, in an educational game, the contents of the bingo worksheets will be based on the particular subject or lesson being taught – in a game of math bingo, the squares may contain numbers which are answers to math problems called out by the teacher, in a game of reading bingo, the squares might contain words chosen from the Dolch sight word list, and so on.
If you want to play one of these variants of bingo, the main requirement is of course a suitable set of bingo worksheets containing the appropriate items for your chosen theme. Preparing a different bingo worksheet for each player might sound like a lot of work, but actually it is not so hard – a computer and some bingo worksheet maker software can make the job quick and easy.
By: Sunil Tanna
