Training Chess: Knights move
Chess authors Brunia and Van Wijgerden made a very nice and well designed training method for learning chess. The method has several `steps'; Step 1 teaches the rules and very basic principles of chess. In the second lesson of this step, two simple games are given for training the basic moves of pieces. These work great for practicing the moves of the pieces with children that do not yet know all the rules of chess. One of these is for training the moves of the knight. I used this game succesfully in my `chess class' with children of 7 - 8 years.A CDrom-version of this training method is sold by TASC.
The game
Eight white and eight black markers are put on the middle on the chess board, and each player has one knight. One can e.g., use little sweets for markers, (or just pawns.) Winner is the player that has taken all the markers of the opposite color.
Comment
The game is really simple, and white will win easily, but the players will know the movement of the knight quite well after the game. To make it more fair, let the children play two games, where each player plays once with white and once with black. See also the trainging game that trains some other pieces.Written by Hans Bodlaender.
WWW page created: October 2, 2001.