Slashdot Mirror
How To Fix The Shortage of K-5 Scholastic Chess Facilitators
theodp writes The good news, writes Michael Thomas, is that wired kids are learning chess at an unprecedented rate. Young children learning chess from tablets can quickly become more knowledgeable than their parents. But the bad news, laments Thomas, is there is so much demand for scholastic chess that there are not enough experienced chess facilitators to go around. Could technology like RFID-tagged chess pieces or services like ChessStream.com be employed to referee second-grader chess matches, Thomas wonders, or are more well-meaning-but-not-necessarily-expert human facilitators — a la T-ball coaches — the answer?
A "shortage"! Quick, import more H1B's!
Table-ized A.I.
What will we as a society do with an unprecedented crisis such as this looming? With all of the other myriad crises plaguing our nation, this is what keeps me up at night.
Every minute playing chess would be better spent learning about algorithms, computer programming, or biology.
The last thing any parent or teacher should do is encourage playing chess at any serious level. It's like encouraging people to compute logarithms or trigonometric functions longhand on paper; there's some initial benefit in learning some abstract ideas, but then it's just mechanics. And the same is true for chess, and computers have established this in a dramatic way, by showing that simple but fast and deep searches with very simple heuristics can beat any human who has ever lived. A $0.50 pocket calculator can bet any human at the sine function game!
The argument made in that article that chess is somehow good for the goals of "STEM" makes me laugh out loud, but simultaneously weep that the idea was proposed with apparent sincerity...
But PacMan keeps eating my pieces
Table-ized A.I.
The issue is with schools cutting extra-curriculum activities, because the teachers want to get paid, and the schools can't afford it. Fix that somehow, and you'll probably get all the coaches you need, not just for chess club, but for sports and the arts.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
I've had two kids now in youth chess and this article smacks of the "wrong direction" I think the youth chess movement is headed.
The trends I saw included:
#1) More PAID chess instructors. Er...for what? The best instruction...and players...are already online, with fully developed laddering, ranking, tutorials, etc.
#2) More REMOTE tournaments. What is this...hockey now? This is a huge barrier to families (e.g., smart immigrants, kids with divorced parents) who can't afford to truck the two hours in each direction - and overnight (i.e., requiring a hotel) meets are on the horizon.
#3) Life AFTER chess is discouraged. In my "gifted" experience, you learned chess in first or second grade, and could take down just about anyone in middle school, but then you moved on from games into programming, higher math, or something else with a lot of other people who outgrew chess as a daily or even weekly activity. However, "outgrowing chess" is no longer OK with this crowd...instead you're expected to keep playing until you ladder up or burn out - yikes.
Come on. The article is a joke. " A chess facilitator brain implant would be wired between perception and cognition. You would just look at the board and know if it is checkmate." Did the original poster not realize this?
Do we really need to promote chess playing to a group of imaginative, energetic children who have just barely grasped the concept of role-taking, and are only barely ready to understand - much less compete in - competitive or team sports? Did they do something to earn this sort of punishment? Are these sort of felons?
Don't get me wrong; I was in a "Chess and Tactical Games Club" when I was in Highschool. We played warhammer 40k with minatures, star trek combat on a hex map that looked like a starscape, and recreated WW2 naval battles in the gym with wood blocks, marked ropes and protractors, played Risk and Axis & Allies. We even played a few economic simulator games.
However, I can't remember playing a single game of chess. This is largely because playing a game where a turn took an hour and a half was more fun than playing chess, and that's coming from a highschool geek back when the term meant something.
My guess is that there's only a perceived shortage of k-5 scholastic chess facilitators, rather, if the number is higher than 1, we probably have more than we ought.
"[Chess] is certainly a pleasing and ingenious amusement, but it seems to have one defect, which is that it is possible to have too much knowledge of it, so that whoever would excel in the game must give a great deal of time to it, as I believe, and as much study as if he would learn some noble science or perform well anything of importance; and yet in the end, for all his pains, he only knows how to play a game. Thus, I think a very unusual thing happens in this, namely that mediocrity is more to be praised than excellence."
-- Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 1528, Book II para. 31, Singleton translation
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I am a full-time chess coach for K-5 kids. I have over 200 students that I see every week. At first I though this article was going to address the very real demand for more skilled coaches in K-5 schools. Instead, the article is trying to push a software/hardware solution that would make it "easier" to adjudicate games and tournaments. This solution is addressing a problem that doesn't actually exist.
Here is the problem they present as an example: an 'argument' between two students about whether a position is checkmate. The presented solution: a variety of software/hardware that will make it easier to 'referee' the position. This is ridiculous. When two students are having an argument, figuring out whether there is checkmate on the board is usually the easiest problem to solve. Getting the students to calm down and be good sports is the hard part.
In addition, there is no shortage of adjudication at tournaments. One or two coaches can easily handle the problems of 300+ students in a tournament. We don't need legions of people equipped with apps to go watch children's games. To make the article even more irrelevant, most tournaments across the world are run with a "non-interference" rule. This means that the tournament staff cannot actually comment on whether a position is checkmate. It is up to the students to come to a decision on their own, agree and report. The coaches with let them report an incorrect result if that is what they agree on. It is part of the game. So the coach doesn't actually need to know whether the position is really checkmate.
The only time an actual ruling needs to be passed is if the students can't come to an agreement. This is very rare and will usually only happen 1 in 2000 games or so. We don't need to RDIF tag all of our 16000+ tournament pieces just so that 1 in 2000 games someone who knows nothing about chess can make an accurate ruling. We'll just bring over an expert in those cases.
A quick aside to those questioning the benefits of K-5 chess, it is hugely beneficial to students. Sure, it would be great if they spent the time they did on chess on other things, like algorithms or biology. However, most students don't get super worked up about algorithms. They aren't going to willingly spend 15 hours a week on algorithms. They will happily spend that time on chess however, and chess is teaching them a lot of the same skills. Critical thinking, carefulness, perseverance, recovering from mistakes, cause and effect, and on, and on.
The most important skill that students learn is how much effort you have to put into something in order to really become an expert. Nothing else a child does in their K-12 years really teaches them that in order to be an expert, you need to spend years and years working on it. Chess is very good at driving this point home.
Anyone saying things like "every minute playing chess would be better spent learning about algorithms, computer programming, or biology." has clearly never sat a kindergartener down and try to teach them algorithms. Every day. For a year. Teach them chess. They will grasp it. They will want to learn. It is fun. They will gain skills that you wouldn't be able to impart in other ways.
But you don't need to take my word on it. The benefits of chess have been have been well studied. Scholastic chess is one of the few things that has been proven to consistently increase academic performance, collage success and future income.
Sounds about right. I played enough tournament games to estimate I was about a 1450 player at my best, and playing Sargon II on the Apple was a pretty evenly matched game. The key to beating early chess games like that, and this is still useful for any small memory chess opponent, is to play something weird. You need to get the computer out of its opening book library as soon as possible, without making an overtly bad move. Moving a pawn a single space forward where most players would taking advantage of being able to move forward two can be enough to break you out of a small book. You could easily tell when Sargon went "off book" because the time it spent thinking about moves went up dramatically, especially on its highest difficulty setting.
I learned some ideas like this from David Levy's excellent 1983 book Computer Gamesmanship. With Sargon, I recall I would do somewhere around 5 moves from the standard opening library before inserting one aimed to go off-book. The first few moves in a chess game tend to be very similar because they work. You don't want to yield control of the middle of the board in favor of breaking out of the book on your first move; that's counterproductive.