Most adults, whether we play the game or not, know how to play the game of bingo.
Moreover, it's the kind of game that even relatively young children can learn and enjoy as well.
These things, along with the fact that bingo can be played using only relatively cheap materials such as pen, paper, and perhaps counters, make it an ideal game for adapting for use in education and as a classroom teaching tool.
One particularly common use of bingo is in introductory reading and English classes.
Young children can have a lot of fun - but they're learning at the same time.
The key ingredient is that the teacher acts as the bingo caller, and the students use bingo cards printed with letters or words selected in advance by the teacher.
There are quite a few different variations that can be played: * Phonemic Awareness Bingo - The bingo cards are printed with letters (they can be capitals or small letters).
The teacher says a word, and the students must find the square with the matching initial letter.
* Sight Word Bingo - The bingo cards are printed with words (often chosen from lists such as the Dolch Sight Word list), and students must find the square containing the word called by the teacher.
* Vocabulary Bingo - The cards are printed with words, and students must find the word  matching a definition called out by the teacher.
* Parts of Speech Bingo - The cards are printed with words, and students are asked to find a noun beginning with "t", a verb beginning with "e", etc.
The common element in all these situations is of course a set of bingo cards containing the items chosen by the teacher.
It is possible to buy preprinted bingo cards perhaps containing some of the items that teachers want, but this could soon get expensive if you need to buy a lot of different bingo cards, and the cards may not contain the exact items required.
The alternative is for the teacher to prepare the bingo cards themselves in advance of class - either by hand (which we can of course be very time-consuming) - or by using a bingo card maker computer program.