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For my inner-city (i.e., economically disadvantaged) elementary and middle school chess clubs, I use tChess Pro extensively on my iPad (cost is about $9), which I plug directly into the overhead projector. Fortunately, the Dallas ISD does not block my website where I have a lot of additional teaching material stored for free (video tutorials, etc.) so that they or anyone else can access it and use it, and I can project that site in the classroom via my iPad. I have put together several pgn databases for openings, endings, tactics, strategies, etc. that I use for instruction. One of them more than three thousand mate in one and mate in two problems.
Our club meets in the school library where we have access to a bank of 20-30 PCs with touch screens. Many of these kids do not have access to iPads, but they have access to PCs, some with and some without internet access. I require them to think, talk, and write in algebraic notation and to record and validate their games and submit them to me via Microsoft OneDrive so that I can put the results into a ranking database that I host on my website. I welcome any public school coach to use this free database program. A handful of clubs currently have autonomous access for their individual clubs. Any coach can contact me (jerry AT sbranch DOT org) and I will set up your club and give you the password you select to upload your roster and manage the extremely simple program. At the conclusion of each game, the players fill out a simple form (one form per game) showing the date, who played white, who played back, and the result (1-0, draw, or 0-1). It takes about 15 seconds for a coach to enter a game into the database. The program immediately does all necessary calculations and then adjusts each player's rating automatically. The kids really like to check their status on a regular basis. And they look forward to the possibility of a significant financial reward for their competitive effort at the end of each school year. We're anticipating a total jackpot of more than a hundred dollars, to be divided among the top 3-5 players. The chess coach is a major benefactor for this effort. They like cash and they also like various kinds of chess merchandise.
Last week five of the middle school chess club members participated in a standardized 'academic chess competition' (i.e., pencil and paper, no real chess pieces, no computers). Most of them were puzzled by one question that asked them to determine which side of an illustrated chessgame had a material advantage. I had discussed relative chess piece values with them at the beginning of the school year but had never used the specific phrase 'material advantage'. So when we get back after Christmas break I will discuss the concepts of material advantage and positional advantage in further detail.
The competition participants will each receive a copy of MCO-14 for their effort. Except that one of my principal players will receive some kind of alternate prize (TBD) because he won the same book a year ago. I will probably let him select an 'appropriately-priced' chess item from the internet.
Since many of my kids do not have iPads, we work with PCs extensively, using Scid vs PC as our principal chess program. It is a free public domain program that I have adopted because it seems to provides all the functionality that we need, e.g., a friendly GUI, a chess engine (that we do not dumb down), capability to handle FEN and SAN, etc.
I have given each club member a three-dollar flash drive. with Scid vs PC installed along with lots of other chess resources (tutorials, books, puzzles, etc). This enables them to study interactively or to play any opponent (club members, friends, parents, relatives, whatever) anywhere they can plug their flash drive into a PC. The school also offers scholastic chess sets to all the students for $10 if they can afford one, or free (ostensibly on loan) if they obtain a parental note that they cannot afford to purchase a chess set.
In response to Shastablue, I recommend tChess Pro if you have an iPad. If you have to use a PC for overhead projection, you can learn to use Scid vs PC as easily as the kids in my club have learned to do so. They all work with it routinely. And there is a thread on chess.com where a bunch of gurus, including the guy who maintains the program, will answer just about any question you throw at him. I recently remarked that the program failed to acknowledge the 50-move limit in a protracted endgame that I had fumbled in practice, and he published a patch for the glitch in less than 24 hours.
Our 15-member club is about three months old. We have already won a second place club trophy in our first all-district (Dallas ISD) tournament, and individual members have won first, second and third place trophies for their grade levels in two different tournaments. We have approximately equal male and female representation. I have three Thai students, one from Nepal, one from Borneo. At least one student is from a middle eastern country. Some are undoubtedly from Mexico, Central America, or South America. Many of my better players are Hispanic, and one of them is in a non-English-speaking household (He of course is fluent with English. He has studied chess with me for more than a year, and he beats me regularly. I am proud that he does; he practices a lot more than I do.) About a quarter of our club is Afro-American. We don't ask the students for any 'country-of-origin' documentation, but in the elementary school where I coach, last year we had slightly over 1000 students with 34 different native languages represented.
Hi Chess.comers... I teach at a highschool, and have a chess club, my question is... is there a program out there that we can use to put anotated games up (from a PGN format) up on our projector? Like the games anotated games that chess.com uses... any ideas? and what is the cost? thank you guys.