Here are the reasons your kids should be playing this 1,500-year-old game of strategy and logic.
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Improves concentration and memory.
According to studies done at the University of Memphis, playing chess significantly improves children’s visual memory, attention span, and spatial-reasoning ability. Perhaps that’s because, in chess as in school, concentration and memory go hand in hand. In order to play well, you have to focus completely on your objective—capturing the opponent’s king. As you constantly visualize the board, its pieces, your moves, and your opponent’s every possible countermove, your power of concentration grows. As your concentration grows, it becomes easier to memorize past games and classic strategies. In the process, both concentration and memory grow stronger in a kind of mutually reinforcing “dance.”
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Enhances reading and math skills.
With its focus on problem solving and move variables, it’s not surprising that chess can improve a student’s math skills. But numerous studies show that chess improves reading skills as well!In separate multi-year studies of elementary-school-age children in Texas, Los Angeles, New York, Pennsylvania, and Canada, researchers found that students who played chess showed more improvement in reading and/or math assessment scores than their non-chess-playing peers. Why does chess improve reading skills? One researcher, educational psychologist Dr. Stuart Marguilies, suggests that it’s because the cognitive processes for both are similar—requiring decoding, thinking, comprehension, and analysis.
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Fosters logic, critical thinking, and creativity.
Chess favors the “if–then” thinker. “If I move here, then my opponent may move here, here, or even here.” That’s logic and critical thinking in action! But studies also show that chess boosts creativity, most dramatically in one specific area—originality.In a four-year study of students in grades 7 to 9, researchers found that playing chess increased original thinking more than two other creativity-training activities did. Why? Researchers theorize that by encouraging students to imagine all possible move alternatives, chess trains the mind to play with possibilities, which is a cornerstone of original thinking.
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Make your IQ higher!
Chess has been shown to raise student’s overall IQ scores. A Venezuelan study involving 4,000 second grade students found a significant increase in their IQ scores after only 4 months of systematically studying chess. Tournament chess games, which bind each player to make his move within the stipulated time, hone one’s ability to perform under pressure, mimicking environments of most school and competitive exams.
Michel Noir, Doctor of Educational Sciences has been shown that children who have taken chess courses for two years increase
– their concentration capacity of 50%,
– their capacity to memorize 22%
– their ability to solve problems by 32% compared to other children.
«In four years of research in cognitive psychology and education, the experiments have yielded convincing evidence of the benefits of chess practice in achieving academic success.»
source : http://www.michelnoir.org/WordPress/edc/2008/09/les-echecs-et-lecole
Conclusion
Playing chess is one operation that fully exercises your mind. Chess is quite like a brain tonic which enhances concentration, patience, and perseverance, as well as develops creativity, intuition, memory, and most importantly, the ability to process and extract information from a set of general principles, learning to make tough decisions and solving problems flexibly. Most importantly it teaches one, a golden virtue — the virtue of Patience.
Chess is an education of choice that plays a certain social role since it allows to meet everyone of all ages – sexes – religions, and offers parents the opportunity to participate.
Learning chess from an early age provides valuable experience and wisdom that can be applied to all situations in life.