iNaturalist Bingo Card Generator

Educators
1

I just finished a 2-week summer course that took students to central California (Cambria/San Simeon) and Santa Rosa Island. The purpose of the class was to get students excited about coastal ecology and the biodiversity that lives there.

This was my first time co-leading a course like this, and I wanted to introduce iNaturalist as part of the curriculum. I reviewed many posts on this forum and gave a lecture before the class on best practices, closely following the content in these slides. We did a practice run on campus, where I helped sort out any technical issues. I then provided feedback on their observations through our class project, which you can find here: BIO-S330 Cal Poly Coastal Field Studies 2025.

That all went fine and well, but the real trick that made iNaturalist a success in this class was the introduction of bingo cards. I quickly coded this script that generates printable bingo cards from the top N species for a given defined place in iNaturalist. The students really loved the scavenger hunt element, and many went on to observe other species beyond what was on the bingo card. I felt it was a nice way to incentivize using the app (you can only win if your species are verifiable on iNaturalist), while avoiding many of the bad incentives detailed elsewhere.

You can make your own bingo cards for free at the following site: iNaturalist Bingo Generator

If you’re handy with code, the project has an open license, and you can do whatever you like with it. It’s really wonderful that the iNaturalist folks maintain such a permissive API, so I feel any derivative projects should also follow suit. If you need a specific feature, feel free to leave a GitHub issue and I’ll try to implement it.

In any case, I wanted to share another tool to help introduce iNaturalist to students. Even the skeptics found the bingo game fun, and we had many winners in the class. Who knows, maybe you’ll want to make your own card the next time you go out observing!

23 Likes
2

Wow! This is a really wonderful tool! It worked like a charm! Thank you so much!

I am not currently teaching, but I am tempted to just use it as a fun challenge for myself or maybe to rope in a few friends or family members.

1 Like
3

Wow! That’s great - more fun than simple checklists. I will try to use it for some of my nature hikes. But first, I need to set up iNat places for them all - our region is too varied to use existing broad-scale places and expect people to find the top taxa on a one-day hike.

Would it be easy to add a filter for “iconic taxon” (birds, plants, mammals, etc.) for those who lead taxa-specific trips?

3 Likes
4

Added! Thanks for the suggestion.

1 Like
5

I would also recommend to increase the amount of species to 1000, since many observers have seen the top 100 species in an area.
Also, to sort by the species “insert user” is missing would be nice as well!

6

Thank you. A great little tool/toy, or whatever other word describes it. I am sure it will come in handy with challenges, schools and events trying to encourage others to explore nature.

7

Nice! We had talked about doing this for events, but didn’t have the coding expertise to bring it off. I’ll be eager to see how others take off on it and modify it. Thank you!