Personal Update:
As I have done in past weeks, I will give some personal updates on how I am progressing in my chess game. This week has been tough for me, I haven’t been able to focus as much time on my chess game as I would have liked to, I didn’t have much time to do the long form chess sessions that I prefer to do and instead had to resort to single shorter games when I had the opportunity which has been less than ideal. Though there is a silver lining to this, I have been able to work on my Bullet Chess, bullet chess is a form of chess that gives each player less than 3 minutes to make decisions, this drastically speeds up the game, leading to quick decision making that you wouldn’t have in a regular game of chess. I think playing this fast form of chess can help my instincts, as well as my decision making if I am being pressured by time.
Conclusion
Overall, this week was not the most productive in terms of working towards my goal, but I was able to get better in a way I would have never thought of. Hopefully, next week is better.
As I have stated in previous weeks, one of my main goals of this project is being able to incorporate this passion into the classroom in an effective way. One of the ideas that I have has been enabled from the skills I have learned in this class, which is fantastic. One of my main concerns I have about incorporating chess in the classroom is learning the rules, now to some this may seem simple, but for kids I know this is an issue. To combat this, I want to make screencast videos giving detailed descriptions of how the pieces move, what the rules are, and any other basic info the students will need to know. I hope to post these to a site that everyone can access like a Google Classroom, and if students are keen, I can post strategies and openings. I hope this can allow for less time teaching the game, and more time for students to actually play and learn from the game.
One of the things I’ve been looking into is incorporating multi-curricular activities into chess; one of the ways I hope to do this is by having students design and create their own chess boards. Not only does this tie into the art curriculum, but it also provides students with their very own chess boards so they can continue to play at home or in future years. I haven’t found a cheap way of doing this, but my hope is the students will be able to create their chess board theme and can design the pieces in a way that fits their style and personality. I am going to continue to look for ideas to make this work, as well as other projects and hopefully, a tournament-style game the students can compete in to test there skills. As the project continues I will continue searching for an accessible way I can create some projects for this.
