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Chess is Child’s Play
By Deborah Mitchell
Issue 139, November/December 2006
Mothers are sometimes overwhelmed by all of the important things we believe we should teach our kids so that they will grow healthy minds, bodies, and spirits. Indeed, the worlds we create for our children—the activities we choose, the books we read to them, the experiences we expose them to, etc.—become the molds we pour our children into. Yet perhaps one of the most important things we can do for our kids is to teach them not what to think but how to think. Developing skills of analysis and critical thinking are vital to succeeding as an independent thinker in school and in life.
Even before my son was born, I, like most new mothers, bought an absurd number of books on parenting. I soon worked myself into a frenzy trying to determine how much advice I could actually pack into his life. But a suggestion buried in the last pages of one of those books caught my attention: teaching young children to play chess helps them learn to think critically, to concentrate, and to solve problems. Thus began a renewed love affair with one of my favorite games.
A Little History
Chess is a captivating battle of strategy and one of the oldest board games. Two players, with 16 pieces each, try to “capture” or checkmate each other’s king. No one is certain who created chess, but many sources suggest that it originated in India, about 1,500 years ago.1 Now considered a sport, the game has been played for hundreds of years in many cultures and is a great equalizer of nations, races, genders, and classes.
There is some question as to whether chess makes kids smart or smart kids like chess, but some things are certain: learning to play the game helps children visualize, analyze, concentrate, recognize patterns, learn self-control, and understand the concepts of cause and effect.2 Unlike so many games played by younger children, chess is not a game of luck, but one that requires players to make purposeful, well-thought-out decisions. In many countries, the game is a standard part of school curricula, used to improve reasoning, math, and verbal skills.
In her book, Children and Chess: A Guide for Educators, Alexey W. Root, PhD, senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Dallas, states that “Chess is a domain where one learns that one’s actions have consequences. Moreover, a teacher might illustrate for students the connections between making a difference at the chessboard and making a difference in the world.”3 Root, the US Women’s Chess Champion in 1989, was taught to play chess by her father at the age of five. She now teaches university-level courses that train educators and parents to use chess for educational purposes.4
Benjamin Franklin played and revered chess, calling it “the most ancient and the most universal game known among men.” He compared the game to life and believed that several “very valuable qualities of the mind” were acquired and strengthened by playing chess.5 If you’ve ever played the game, you understand why.
I learned chess in my teens and have always loved the game. Yet my child, now ten years old, was only four when I considered teaching him. I wondered, At what age can a child grasp the complex rules of chess? Root believes that “It’s possible to have a grasp of the rules of chess at four or five years old.”6 However, part of the beauty of chess is that, as the child matures, so will his understanding of the strategies and nuances of the game. Most five-year-olds play chess games dramatically different from those of seven-year-olds, and the games of seven-year-olds are different from those of nine-year-olds.
For example, five-year-olds are still mastering the fundamentals of how each piece moves, while nine-year-olds can understand the more complex rules of moves, such as castling. Typically, only one chess piece can be moved at a time, but in castling, if certain conditions are met, a player can move two pieces at once. Older children can execute the move and understand the importance of castling in the protection of the king.
The Research
In a study of 14 sixth-grade students near Bradford, Pennsylvania, researcher Robert Ferguson used the USA Junior Chess Olympics Training Program to teach students the game. The children were evaluated with the Test of Cognitive Skills and the California Achievement Test. Ferguson found that students who played chess each day during the school year experienced significant increases in their memory and verbal-reasoning skills.7
Joan DuBois of the United States Chess Federation, a nonprofit corporation founded in 1939, says the USCF now has 45,000 youth members, 30,000 of whom are younger than 15. And the game’s image is changing—it’s no longer only for “nerdy” or “gifted” students. The USCF promotes chess in the schools, both as an after-school activity and as part of the curriculum. They sponsor a Chess-For-Youth Program, and claim that “chess has proven to help students enhance their creativity, improve their power of concentration, develop and expand critical thinking skills, boost memory and retention, and achieve superior academic performance.”8
A Simple Start
When he was four, I sat down with my son and gave him his first, very basic lesson in chess, trying to put the rules of this game of strategy in simple terms. This was not easy. A four-year-old can’t easily grasp the complexities of how an army of chess pieces can be made to move across the board to “capture,” but not remove, the opponent’s king. Yet my son was intrigued and kept coming back to the game. Perhaps it was the interesting shapes of the carved stone pieces.
If you don’t know how to play, you and your child can learn together. I began by teaching my son the simple Pawn Game, which many chess teachers recommend as a great place to start for young children (see “The Pawn Game,” for rules). If you and your child already know the basics of the game, try removing your queen from the board to give your child an advantage. But never “throw” the game by losing deliberately—children enjoy the sport of chess, and losing to you, a better player, will give a kid a goal to work toward.
You might also consider letting your child turn the board around at different times during the game. Not only will this help her as she learns, but it will also help her develop perspective. She now must step into the place where another person has been thinking. As your child learns, reduce the number of times the board can be turned.
Girls and Chess
As a chess coach at my son’s elementary school, I’ve noticed that the club’s membership is overwhelmingly male, as is the case with most chess clubs. Yet the game is just as beneficial to girls. Root says there are inherent reasons why boys favor the game: “Boys tend to show a greater interest in formal, competitive games than girls do. . . . Girls joining later might be discouraged by not seeing other girls at the club, or simply not enjoy the emphasis on chess competition rather than other aspects of chess.” Root suggests that offering chess during the school day to all kids might increase interest. Also, mothers can set an example by learning to play chess so that they can play with their daughters or start chess clubs. The noncompetitive aspects of chess, which girls may enjoy more, can also be emphasized, Root notes, through “chess art projects, solving chess problems together, and playing as a chess team.”9 (Chess art encompasses artistic expressions of chess, from the design of chessboards and pieces to literature and films that focus on chess playing or players.)
Play, Play, Play
How often should a child play in order to reap the benefits? “Part of the benefit of chess, analogous to the benefit of playing music, is the routine of practice,” says Root. “I’d expect a student interested in chess would practice as often as a child studying a musical instrument.” She notes that learning chess notation, a method of recording moves using letters and numbers, enhances the benefits of chess.10
In our house, we play chess every night before reading a book. We also play by the “touch move” rule: if a piece is touched, it must be moved. It was my friend Vincent Bazemore, a USCF chess expert and coach, who suggested that we first visualize three possible moves before we decide which piece to touch and move. The ability to imagine what the board will look like after a move, to think several turns ahead, and to choose from several options is essential not only to improving in chess but also to strengthening a child’s critical thinking skills.
Teresa Acosta, who, along with her husband, runs the chess club at Wolford Elementary School in McKinney, Texas, tells her students to “sit on their hands.” This is one way to help kids resist the impulse to touch and move without thinking first.
If you watch children play and get into the game, you will notice that even rambunctious kids can settle down and concentrate. Root says that this state is known as what popular author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.” “As children control their thoughts and get feedback from each move they make (they might win a piece or lose a pawn), they feel the attraction of the game of chess. Their sense of time may be altered during the chess game: an hour might seem like 20 minutes.”11 It is similar to the experience of timelessness one feels when immersed in a very good book.
Low Cost, Many Options
Chess is cheap—a set of pieces with a board can be bought for less than $10. Small magnetic chess sets are available for playing while traveling. Because the game requires no sophisticated electronic devices, kids can play chess with their parents, siblings, or friends almost anywhere. Chess computer programs can be used as teaching tools or as another player, and parents and children can team up against the computer. There are many safe sites on the Internet through which kids can play other opponents from around the world. Children can also use their creative side to make their own chess pieces out of clay or other art supplies.
An older sibling can teach a younger sibling: after my second son was born, my older child taught him how to play, which not only reinforced my older son’s chess skills but helped to strengthen his bond with his brother. For such a small investment, this versatile game offers many options and benefits.
Chess Clubs
Starting a chess club at school is a good way to find players of the same age for your children. Even kindergartners can be interested. And if you’re not a chess player yourself, you can start a club anyway and learn as you go. (For more information, see “Guide to Scholastic Chess” brochure, www.uschess.org/about/forms/.)
“What’s been neat in our club,” says Acosta, “is to see how many kids go home and teach their parents.” The club was so popular that it had to turn some students away.
There are many scholastic chess tournaments for your club to participate in. Children can usually choose between rated and nonrated sections. (In rated chess, a player earns numerical values that correlate to his or her ability. Ratings change with tournament wins and losses.) Prizes range from trophies to full four-year college scholarships. In April 2005, the University of Texas at Dallas awarded three four-year scholarships, with a cash value of approximately $48,000 each, to the winners of a scholastic chess tournament in Nashville, Tennessee.12 In fact, about two dozen colleges with chess teams are recruiting players by offering scholarship money.13
I have found that chess gives my children ever-changing problems to solve and a venue within which they can learn restraint. It teaches them to evaluate their choices: Was that move good? What are its consequences? Chess appears to have helped them to concentrate better. Over the years, I have taught them to slow down, to fight the impulse to make the first obvious move that pops into their heads.
Mothers can get caught up in the routines of caring for their children, but it is equally important that we teach them how to think. Perhaps playing chess regularly is good for children’s brains, helping them to become good critical thinkers and to develop important educational and life skills. Perhaps not. At the very least, the time spent with our kids deeply immersed in thought, instead of playing a video game or watching television, has been time well spent.
Deborah Mitchell, a freelance writer living in the Dallas area, is the mother of two chess-playing boys and is a chess coach at their elementary school. She received her graduate degree from the University of Texas at Dallas, which has the best college chess team in the nation.
NOTES
1. Richard Eales, Chess: The History of a Game (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1985): 19–38.
2. Many studies support this belief. For more information, see www.gardinerchess.com/publicationsbenefits/educational_benefits.htm.
3. Alexey W. Root, Children and Chess: A Guide for Educators (Westport, CT: Teacher Ideas Press, http://lu.com/index.cfm: 2006): 30.
4. For more information, see http://chessweb.utdallas.edu/edu.html.
5. Esmond Wright, ed., Benjamin Franklin: His Life as He Wrote It (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989): 255–257.
6. Phone interview (11 February 2005).
7. Robert Ferguson, “The USA Junior Chess Olympics Research: Developing Memory and Verbal Reasoning,” New Horizons for Learning online journal (April–June 2001); www.newhorizons.org/neuro/ferguson.htm.
8. “Facts About the U.S. Chess Trust’s Chess-For-Youth Program,” brochure, www.uschess.org/about/forms/FactsAboutCFYProgram.pdf.
9. E-mail interview (12 October 2005).
10. Phone interview (11 February 2005).
11. E-mail interview (12 October 2005).
12. “UTD Gives Chess Scholarships to Students from California, Florida and Georgia,” University of Texas at Dallas press release (April 2005); www.utdallas.edu/news/archive/2005/chess-supernationals.html.
13. Scholarship Information, U.S. Chess Online; www.uschess.org/scholastic/scholarship.html.
THE PAWN GAME
Chess can help younger children learn to count and to recognize patterns. Start with the basic Pawn Game. Set up only the pawns—the game’s “foot soldiers”—on the second row at each end of the board. The object of the Pawn Game is to be the first player to get one pawn to the opposite side of the board. On the first move only, a pawn can move directly forward one or two squares. After that, it can move only one square at a time. A pawn must move directly forward unless it is capturing another piece, in which case it can move one square forward on the diagonal. When the child understands how pawns can and cannot move, add a new piece to the board—a bishop, for example. (For more information about the rules of chess, visit www.chesskids.com.)
—DEBORAH MITCHELL
LEARNING TO TEACH CHESS
The University of Texas at Dallas is the only university in the US to offer a certificate program in chess for teachers, coaches, and parents. The two-semester, online program is designed to help teachers use chess in the classroom. Dr. Alexey Root says that the course is also helpful for parents who want “to better teach their own children chess or to volunteer as chess club coaches or helpers. Within the course, all the online students learn how chess can help students engage in flow experiences, problem solve, benefit from competition, and socialize with persons of all ages and backgrounds.”1 For more information, visit http://chessweb.utdallas.edu/edu.html.
Other good chess websites for families:
www.chesskids.com
www.chessville.com/index2.html
www.uschess.org
www.turbulence.org/spotlight/thinking/
For more articles, see www.gardinerchess.com/publicationsbenefits/educational_benefits.htm.
NOTE
1. E-mail interview (12 October 2005).
—DEBORAH MITCHELL
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