Let's say you're doing, I don't know, a lesson on cellular biology. After wrapping it up, on Friday afternoon, you want to play a fun game which still has some educational content. So you print out one Parts of A Cell bingo card for each student in your class and explain how bingo works (or not, because they've almost certainly played before).

Then start calling things like "This center of the cell is where the chromosomes are stored". Kids mark "nucleus" on their bingo card. Repeat a few times -- somebody wins, the rest of the class comes close to winning (this is the diabolically brilliant thing about bingo), everybody is happy and most don't realize they've just reviewed some vocabulary.

Yes, this is a quite common activity in America. You'll find it in almost any book of teacher activities from elementary school through high school.

Bingo has a few features which make it particularly good from the teacher's perspective, incidentally. It scales to any number of kids with one teacher (not true of all games), it performs excellent crowd control since all students are forced to proceed at the same pace (very not true of all games), it doesn't pit students directly against one another (many American teachers do not believe that is wise), it is very difficult to be bad at bingo (in a way it is not difficult to be bad at e.g. spelling bees), there is an element of luck involved so the winner will almost certainly not be the strongest student in the class (some teachers believe this is wise), etc etc.