A Game of Bingo: A Secondary-School Inquiry Activity About Percolation

Percolation theory refers to a geometrical and stochastic approach to describing whole macroscopic properties from local microscopic connections. Percolation is associated with many familiar phenomena; however, scholars have not sufficiently developed teaching materials and learning activities that allow students to experientially study its basic features. In connection with this, bingo is a familiar game that can be explained by percolation theory. Hence, this study conducted a simple inquiry activity for junior high school students to learn about percolation through bingo as an extracurricular task. The game’s experimental scale and methods were designed in such a way that even younger students could easily perform the experiment and that the percolation threshold could be clearly identified from the results. Through the bingo game, students were able to understand a critical situation where many bingo patterns are suddenly completed. The teaching material and inquiry activity were found to be useful for teachers/learners to teach/learn the basic concept of percolation with low-cost preparations and easy operations.