It can be really fun to come up with games to play during lab meeting. Lab meeting Bingo and / or conference Bingo games are fairly popular. Herein, I describe how I've done this in one of my lab meetings. The goal was to keep people engaged and excited about the research.
I created the Bingo cards using Microsoft Publisher (lab_meeting_bingo_template.pub). The dimensions were set so that the cards could be printed out on Avery 8387 Matte White Postcards. In the repository there is also a pdf template (lab_meeting_bingo_template.pdf) that should work as well.
There were two presenters at my lab meeting so I selected a set of words from both our presentations, as well as, some generic words in our field. I then strategically placed them around the card so "hopefully" the winner would have to listen to both talks to win. As an example, the words for my talk were:
tntwords <- c("de novo", "genome", "CNV", "SNP", "indel", "Illumina", "QC", "autism", "PCA", "variants", "father", "exome", "validation", "pedigree", "burden", "regulatory", "SFARI")
Since, the lab meeting was for a fairly large group I made 9 different cards. Using R's sample function I picked a random subset of these words for the card as follows:
forcardstnt <- sample(tntwords, 12)
Obviously, you may pick words any way you want. This is just how I did it.
For some bit of fun for the players I got Crayola Stampers for people to mark off their cards.
