#Teachers Coding – Bingo Cards

When I attended a Calculus AB workshop back in 2003, one of the nice takeaways was a huge binder of materials that could be used immediately with students. I ended up scanning much of those materials and taking the digital versions with me when I moved overseas.

One of these activities was called derivative bingo. This was a set of two sheets, one with a list of expressions, and another a 5 x 5 bingo card with the derivatives of those expressions. It was perfect to use after introducing derivative rules such as the product and quotient rules to develop proficiency.

It also wasn’t as fun of an activity for two reasons. The first was that I only had one bingo card provided as part of the activity. Since everyone had the same card, everyone would really obtain five in a row after doing the same set of problems. Yes, I could have made different ones at some point in the past twelve years to resolve this problem, but I never thought about it with enough advance time to do so. The other reason was that the order of the list of derivatives was carefully designed so that you only obtained five in a row after doing most of the problems provided. Good for the purposes of getting students to do more practice, but definitely an attribute that hacks the entertainment value even more.

As you might expect, I wrote a computer tool to manage this. You can visit this site and see a sample card. Reload the page, and you’ll generate a new one.

This turned into a nice little competition between groups of students, and I kept a tally of how many total rows had been matched by each group as they developed. The different cards led to some great conversations between students about their results:

I use the KaTEX rendering library to make the mathematical expressions look good. If you would like to edit the files for use with your own class, you can go to the GitHub repository here and download a zip file with all of the files. You’ll find instructions there for changing the code to fit your needs. If those instructions don’t make sense to you, let me know.

If you would just like a set of cards for the derivative practice activity that is ready for use with a class, that PDF is here: derivative-bingo-class-files