Usage

Command-line application

First, create the cardset specification file. The recommended format is YAML.

Here is an example such file:

name: Human Bingo
instructions: |
    Find people in the class (other than yourself) who match the descriptions
    in each box; write their name in the box.

    Try to fill as many boxes as possible (one box per person). Five in a row wins!
properties: !!omap
# First-level item keys are the category names
# Second-level items are the values for those categories
- Origin:
    - New York City
    - New Jersey
    - US East Coast
    - US West Coast
    - US Midwest
    - US South
    # ...
- Housing:
    # First Year Halls
    - Brittany Hall
    - Founders Hall
    - Goddard Hall
    # ...
- Math:
    - thinks that math is cool
    - thinks that math is for losers
    - is required to take this class
    - is math anxious
    # ...
- Interests:
    # ...
- Potpourri:
    - has a blog
    - has a Windows Phone
    - has a fidget spinner
    # ...
free_space_value: Wants to get an A in this class

The package was created to create icebreaker activities in an undergraduate math class. That is why the categories are related to math, or college, or things college students may like to do.

You must have five categories; more or fewer is not supported at this time. For each category, you must have at least five values. A regular bingo card has fifteen possible values (numbers) in each category (letter). Feel free to have many more values in a category (especially if they form a complete list), but don’t be so obscure that a particular card becomes impossible to fill.

Save this into a file called, for instance, spec.yml.

To make a single card file as PDF, use

$ humanbingo -n 1 spec.yml

This will result in a file card01.pdf in the same directory.

It’s more fun if different people have different cards, though. So if you have 20-30 people in the room, use

$ humanbingo -n 30 spec.yml

and you will get 30 PDFs named card01.pdf through card30.pdf.

You can print those files individually, or, if you have the pdftk utility installed, you can concatenate them all into a single file:

$ /path/to/pdftk card*.pdf cat output allcards.pdf

Then print the one file.

As a python package

To use Human Bingo in a project:

import humanbingo

See the package modules documentation for the full API.