SATURDAY ENRICHMENT FALL 2019 INTRODUCTION TO CHESS: EXERCISING YOUR BRAIN Instructor: Cary R. Easterday Instructor Email: [email protected] Location: Loew Hall 118 Course Description A healthy lifestyle includes physical and mental fitness. Playing chess improves memory, concentration, foresight, math skills, reading skills, creativity, and problem-solving skills. Each week the instructor will provide puzzles, lessons, videos, and one-on-one play, monitor student progress, and help with questions. Lessons include setup, piece movements, strategy, tactics, openings, middlegame, endgame, chess notation, popular variants, and history. No experience is necessary. Learning Outcomes By the end of this course, students should be able to: • Play standard chess, including such moves as castle, en passant, and pawn promotion. • Demonstrate chess tactics such as forks, pins, skewers, batteries, discovered attacks, undermining, overloading, deflection, and sacrifices. • Record games using algebraic and descriptive chess notations. • Play popular chess variants such as Bughouse, Chess960, Transcendental, King of the Hill, Upside-down, Atomic, Pawns Game, Peasants’ Revolt, and four-player Quad Kingdom. • Play in a chess tournament, if they choose (optional participation). Instructional Strategies • The instructor uses inquiry-based instruction to inspire student creativity and problem- solving abilities. • Students play chess games via cooperative learning and differentiation. • Each student receives a gold membership to Chesskid.com and has access to technology (computers, notebooks, phones) to solve chess puzzles, take self-paced chess lessons, and play online chess games with computer bots or other students. Student Assessment There is no formal assessment for this course. The instructor will observe one-on-one play each week and will informally assess a student’s progress as they answer questions, solve puzzles, and progress in lessons/ranking on Chesskid.com. Resources and Materials All students have gold member access to Chesskid.com. Older students (grades 4-8) will be pro- vided with a notebook and chess scorebook (for recording games). Introduction to Chess Syllabus, p. 2 Tentative Course Schedule Date Topic(s) and In-class Activities Week 1 How to set up the chess board, piece names and moves, board coordinate sys- Oct 5 tem. Week 2 How to record, read, and study games – algebraic short notation. Special moves Oct 12 in chess. Week 3 How to win (checkmate!). Endgame puzzles. Oct 19 Week 4 Chess tactics: forks, pins, skewers. Oct 26 Week 5 Chess tactics: batteries and sacrifices. Nov 2 Week 6 Chess tactics: discovered attacks, overloading. Nov 9 Week 7 Chess tactics: undermining, deflection. Nov 16 Week 8 Chess openings/defenses: classical v hypermodern, open v. closed, double-king- Nov 23 pawn. Guggenheim Annex Box 351630 Seattle, Washington 98195-1630 206-543-4160 [email protected] http://RobinsonCenter.uw.edu .