Emotional Machines - The Expert Gambler

When most people think of bingo, they think about the game as played by seniors in retirement castles. While it’s certainly true that many seniors do enjoy bingo, variants of the game can also be played in school as a fun way to learn. When played in school, bingo can help teach reading, math, geography, science or music, and can also be used as a means to help students and teacher get to know each other.

Here are some variants of bingo suitable to play in school:

1. Reading and English as a Second Language: The teacher prints up some bingo card containing “Dolch Sight Words”. These are common English words that can’t be sounded out phonetically, but that students must learn to recognize in order to become fluent English readers. Then you simply play bingo. If you want to save paper, instead of crossing off words as they are called, students can place a counter over the appropriate squares on their sight word bingo cards.

2. Math: The teacher can print out bingo cards with numbers on them, and then instead of calling out numbers directly call out sums that would evaluate to the number. For example, instead of calling out “63″ the teacher might call out “9 times 7″.

3. Geography and Science: Both these subjects involve many facts and details that must be learned. For example, you could play bingo using country names, national or state capitals or chemical elements. As with other variants, the teacher could call out a question or description (e.g. “The capital of France?”), and students have to figure out whether the answer (e.g. “Paris“) is on their bingo card.

4. Music: You can also play bingo using musical symbols - which is a interesting way to help improve student’s ability to quickly recognize them. If you’re printing bingo cards on the computer - simply use a music font when printing your bingo cards.

5. Ice-breaker Bingo: This is a nice way to introduce students to each other (and to the teacher) on the first day of school. Before class, the teacher should prepare a set of bingo cards with all the student’s names on them. The bingo cards are then given out to each student. The teacher then goes round the class, picking students at random. Each student has to stand-up and introduce themselves by name and tell the class something about themselves (what they did in summer, their favorite hobby, or something like that). If somebody calls bingo, they have to say something like “I have a bingo with Alice, Bob, Charles, David and Edward” and then identify each of the students in question.