Saturday, 22nd of April, starting at 11:00 am (London time)

Why Strategy Games?

Many strategy games playable on a chessboard are simpler and more accessible than chess. Building up children’s confidence, and laying the groundwork for chess, are highly important for beginners.

This interactive one-day course shows how different strategy games can be used in conjunction with teaching chess by keeping the children motivated and providing a wider variety of games. 

In this interactive one-day training course, we introduce several games playable on a chessboard. It`s a variety of chess mini-games, chess variants, chessy math & logic puzzles, and other strategy games. We use these games to lay the groundwork for chess which can be difficult for several children at the beginning of their learning chess journey.

They might lose interest, they might give up early, and they might think they are not clever enough to learn chess.

We don`t want that. Instead, we want them to enjoy "chess class" and feel successful from the very first lesson.

Our aim is to emphasize the educational benefits of these games and demonstrate how we can achieve a range of learning outcomes with careful planning.

Course objective:

The objective of this course is to encourage educators to develop thinking skills through the playing of various strategy games. These games help pupils to discover for themselves some of the patterns and logic required to play a game. Development is achieved through cognitive stimulation through play, problems and exercises. Pupils obtain a deeper understanding by exploring the underlying concepts in gameplay.

The course will introduce several of these games all playable on a chessboard and a compendium of 36 games will be made available to attendees. 

The course presenters are John Foley and Brigitta Peszleg from ChessPlus

John was the lead author on the Erasmus Plus projects for Chess and Mathematics as well as Chess and Strategy Games. He is a member of the European Chess Union's Education Commission. 

Brigitta has years of experience as a chess player and has been teaching chess in England and Hungary for many years. She holds a degree in Educational Sciences and works in education since 2006.