Most people are familiar with the game of bingo, pretty much everybody has either played it already or at least knows how to play it. Of course there are many familiar images associated with bingo. These include, for example, seniors playing the game in retirement homes, people playing as a church or community activity, and of course nowadays people playing bingo online through the Internet, but it would wrong to imagine that these familiar images form a complete or even necessarily representative picture of the game today.
Nowadays bingo is becoming popular with more and more people. This is partly because people are finding ways to adapt the game to new situations, such as special holiday-themed versions of the game (e.g. Christmas, New Year, Halloween, July 4th), or bingo adapted to social events (including baby showers and wedding showers), and partly because many educators are now using bingo as a teaching tool.
The thing that all these new adaptations and variations of bingo have in common, is they rely on special customized bingo cards. In traditional bingo, players use bingo cards containing numbers, however specialist versions of bingo use cards containing words or phrases appropriate to the particular them of the game. For example, a Christmas-themed version of bingo would use words like “Reindeer”, “Santa Claus” or “Yule”, a wedding shower version would use words like “bride”, “cake” or “dress”, and educational versions would use words that students are learning to read (English), math problems (math), names of elements (science), etc.
In the past, creating such specially-themed bingo cards, especially for a large number of people or entire class, was no easy task. Today however, you can simply print them out from your computer – with the right bingo card maker software, the job can take a minute or less!
By: Sunil Tanna
Pretty much everybody knows how to play bingo right? Each player gets a card containing a grid of numbers (usually a 5 by 5 grid with a special “free space” square in the middle), the bingo announcer calls out numbers in random order, plays check off the corresponding numbers from their bingo cards, and the first player to get an agreed upon pattern (usually a line of five in any direction regardless of whether it’s horizontal, vertical or diagonal), is a the winner. You can buy ready-made bingo cards, so why would anybody make to make their own bingo cards?
The answer lies in the fact that themed variants of the standard game have become massively more popular in the bingo cards. In themed versions of bingo, the bingo cards are not printed with numbers, but instead are printed with words, phrases, or even math problems.
Probably the most popular themed versions of the game are those based around particular holidays such as Christmas, St. Valentine’s Day, Easter, Halloween or July 4th (US Independence Day). In these variants, they are printed with words or phrases relating to the particular holiday in question, so items like “Angel”, “Santa Claus” and “Yule” would be used for Christmas bingo, whereas as words like “Heart”, “Love” or “Romance” would be used for St. Valentine’s Day bingo.
Versions of bingo using custom bingo cards are also popular in education. Teachers can prepare them based around any subject or lesson plan, and can also vary game play, for example by calling out “clues” and requiring students to find the corresponding word or phrase. In language classes, bingo calls can be made in one language, and students required to match the corresponding word in another language.
In math classes, these can be printed with math problems in each square, and students can be required to write in the correct answer when an item is called, rather than merely tick off a square. Of course, even the standard game mechanics can be suitable for classroom use in the right situation – for example, an essential part of learning to read fluently is learning to quickly recognize common words (known as “sight words”) – and this can be practiced by playing sight word bingo.
By: Sunil Tanna
