Walking bingo: (Bits of) Love in practice

As the COVID crisis first struck and started affecting everybody’s lives, one of the major recurring questions was “how should children keep themselves entertained during the lockdowns?”.

At a tricky and uncertain point in time, Bits of Love put its creativity and know-how to good use by coming up with the answer: the Wandelbingo (walking bingo).

One of the most important pieces of lockdown advice given by experts was to keep moving, but that wasn’t always easy. Especially not with young children. Even if the daily walks were fun at first – being greeted by teddy bears on windowsills definitely helped – it became increasingly difficult to keep children motivated.

This got us thinking: since we’re convinced that technology has a unique ability to offer added social value, shouldn’t this also apply in times of ‘walking fatigue’?

For this internal project, we put together interactive search walks tailored to children’s needs: personalised to their interests and/or living environment. The goal is to find and tick off the items in question during these walks. Children can choose several different themes such as road signs, animals, trees, car brands, letters of the alphabet, holiday objects, and more. When they’ve pinned down a full row of four items, they shout out ‘BINGO!’.

During the UX process, our initial app concept was adapted to a treasure hunt style checklist that can be printed out to keep children away from their screens for a little while. However, that doesn’t mean the project became any easier to realise: the tool is powered by a bespoke and scalable back-end where new items and themes are added regularly. To date, over 7.000 walking bingos have already been printed.

This project started in our labs and was fuelled by our team’s do-good values. We aimed to make a small difference for parents with young children who needed to copy with many hours of a lockdown. Stood strongly against COVID as a team: spread happiness, not the virus!