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Sunday June 27, 2004

Chess for kids

Our son, who is five started going to Chess Club during his last few months in Kindergarten. His idea of chess at the moment is to try to capture more pieces than his opponent as fast as he can. No concept of strategy yet. No trying to think a few moves ahead and work towards a checkmate.
Okay. Fair enough. I can understand this. What has been hard up to now though is finding a computer chess program that I can "dumb down" so that it's not continually thrashing him. Then I remembered that I had ChessMaster 5500. This is a few years old now, but it has the ability to easily set how long the computer "thinks" for. I set this down to one second, and it made lots of silly mistakes. Good. He can beat it at this level which will increase his confidence and then he can slowly increase the computer's skill level by giving it more time to make its move.

I noticed that the ChessMaster series is now up to its 10th Edition with a free 8 hour download available to try. We don't need all the new fancy features but it's good to note that it's still a very popular program.

But what are other good resources for chess for young kids? I've been told that LEGO Chess is excellent. We should probably try that out. I also found a few useful links at Chess Central but even there it looks like they are aimed at the slightly older children that can read and write (8+). Maybe we are trying to do this too early...

Any recommendations for very young kids?

[Technorati Tag: Games]

[Technorati Tag: Chess]

( Jun 27 2004, 05:39:41 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [3]

Comments:

www.academicchess.com [AcademicChess] Great tutorials presented in a fun format and kids can play agains eachother.

Posted by david brady on June 28, 2004 at 12:38 PM PDT #

May I recommend the pdf-book from these Guys: http://www.chesskids.com/csmenu.shtml I think it's a great introduction (actually for teachers of kids), and IMHO it's not only good for teaching kids. ;)

Posted by Sencer on June 29, 2004 at 01:13 AM PDT #

Have you heard of "atomic chess"? Whenever a piece captures another piece, there is a small explosion and all pieces in the immediate 9-square grid centered on the taken piece also die (except for pawns). See http://www.chessvariants.com/difftaking.dir/atomic.html I've found this to be a lot of fun for kids, and also for playing with kids (or for when you are feeling like a kid - I personally love this game!).

Posted by Peter Korn on June 29, 2004 at 03:08 AM PDT #