Walk­ing bin­go: (Bits of) Love in practice

One of the most impor­tant pieces of advice from the experts dur­ing the lock­down was: keep mov­ing. But that wasn’t always easy, espe­cial­ly not with chil­dren. If the dai­ly walks were con­sid­ered fun at first — with ted­dy bears in front of the win­dows — it became increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to keep the chil­dren moti­vat­ed. That got us think­ing: since we are con­vinced that tech­nol­o­gy can offer social added val­ue, should­n’t this also apply in times of ​‘walk­ing fatigue’? The idea of Wan­del­bingo was born.

With­in this inter­nal project, inter­ac­tive search walks were devel­oped, tai­lored to children’s needs and per­son­alised accord­ing to their inter­ests and/​or liv­ing envi­ron­ment. The inten­tion is that dur­ing these walks, they find and tick the items in ques­tion. When they have locat­ed a full row of four items, they shout out ​‘bin­go’. Chil­dren can choose dif­fer­ent themed walks: road signs, ani­mals, trees, car brands, let­ters of the alpha­bet, hol­i­day objects …

The ini­tial idea of an app was changed dur­ing the UX process to a trea­sure hunt that could be print­ed out — to keep the chil­dren away from their screens for a while. This does­n’t mean the project was easy: the tool is pow­ered by a bespoke scal­able back­end where new items and themes are added reg­u­lar­ly. To date, more than 7000 Walk­ing Bin­gos have already been printed.

This project start­ed in our Labs and was fueled by our teams’ do-good val­ues. We aimed to make a small dif­fer­ence for par­ents with young chil­dren who had to cope with many lock­down hours. Togeth­er against coro­na: spread some hap­pi­ness, not the virus!