Teaching Kids to Play Chess

Teaching Kids to Play Chess

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Studies have shown that kids who take up chess improve their test scores and tend to do well academically. Additionally, our years of experience have shown us that the principles of discipline, planning and understanding consequences that kids learn through Chess benefit their lives in other positive ways besides school work.

Chess has also been shown to help kids with behavioural issues. The kids may think they are just having fun, but we know that they learn a lot more than just how to play the world’s greatest game.

Chess has been touted for centuries as a way of educating the mind in preparation for life. The same is true today: Googling “Chess in Education” results in 998,000 hits. Interest in chess as an educational tool began in 1779, when Benjamin Franklin wrote:

“The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it, so as to become habits ready on all occasions.

For life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events that are, in some degree, the effect of prudence, or the want of it. By playing at Chess, then, we may learn foresight, circumspection and caution.”

Hi, I am David from Australia. I enjoy most forms of Chess and Chess Variants including:

Chaturaji: four-handed version of chaturanga, played with a die.

Chaturanga: an ancient East Indian game, presumed to be the common ancestor of chess and other national chess-related games.

Courier Chess: played in Europe from 15th to 19th century. Probably was one step in evolving modern chess out of shatranj.

Shatranj: an ancient Persian game, derived from chaturanga.

Short Assize: Played in England and Paris in the second half of the 12th century. Tamerlane chess: a significantly expanded variation of shatranj.

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