Lior Gradstein's Blog » chess http://www.gradstein.info Thu, 13 May 2010 09:46:29 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 New chess website for Chess education/promotion http://www.gradstein.info/kid/new-chess-website-for-chess-educationpromotion/ http://www.gradstein.info/kid/new-chess-website-for-chess-educationpromotion/#comments Tue, 29 Dec 2009 21:53:30 +0000 admin http://www.gradstein.info/?p=277 Chess setBNPParibas in association with the FIDE created a new nicely done website (in french only). The goal of this website is to show the usefulness of chess to parents/teachers or schools. Children will also be happy to consult this website, there are cool games, and even a quiz, where one can win a sort of printable “diploma”. A really nice initiative.

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]]> http://www.gradstein.info/kid/new-chess-website-for-chess-educationpromotion/feed/ 0 Easy chess games for kids (mate in one) http://www.gradstein.info/kid/easy-chess-games-for-kids-mate-in-one/ http://www.gradstein.info/kid/easy-chess-games-for-kids-mate-in-one/#comments Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:45:12 +0000 Lior Gradstein http://www.gradstein.info/?p=151 In my journey to teach chess to Ido, an easy (I thought) job was to generate diagrams where he has to find mate in a fixed number of turns. Starting with mate in one.
It appeared that making diagrams is an easy task, as there are many programs (Linux and Windows) that permit this.
On Linux, the best I could find is scid. That’s cool as I use it to maintain my databases of games. Even cooler, is that scid development has just restarted (stopped around 2004!), with the help of Pascal Georges. Using scid (I’m using the 3.7devel2009 version) I can export games to HTML or even to LaTeX files.

At first I thought I’d create the endings myself, for example, using online diagrams generators or using Wikipedia/MediaWiki’s templates, but it was not so easy, so I thought about making a program to generate them.
Generating one from scratch would take me time I really don’t have, and there are just two python modules that give high-level functions to chess.
So I started looking for projects similar to mine, that include games with mate in one. I found a small database of mate in one on my favorite chess website, in the download section: a Chessbase datafile with 1171 mate in one studies! So cool.

Well, It was really a pain to convert that Chessbase (.cbv) file, as the only program able to convert to PGN is running on Windows　(at least it’s free). You just have to follow the instructions from this thread.
After getting a nice PGN file, just open it with scid, go to “Tools”, then select “Write the filter”, and choose LaTeX. You’ll get a TeX file. Use you favorite TeX generator (Live TeX seems to be the one today), like this for example, to generate directly a PDF file:

cat mat_temp.tex |grep -v "\\\\$" > mate_in_one.tex
latex –output-format=pdf mate_in_one.tex

(Yes I had to cleanup a bit the file before generating the .pdf)

The result is here, 196 pages of tests (6 one each page) if you don’t want to fight with the missing TeX modules (you’ll need chess12.sty) and get a nice result.

I’m sure many people search for this kind of file, so I’m pretty happy to help other parents/coaches.

White mate in one

White mate in one

Edit: I added a PDF version without the solution included.

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]]> http://www.gradstein.info/kid/easy-chess-games-for-kids-mate-in-one/feed/ 5 Ido’s chess Journey: How to teach chess to a 3 year old kid http://www.gradstein.info/kid/idos-chess-journey-how-to-teach-chess-to-a-3-year-old-kid/ http://www.gradstein.info/kid/idos-chess-journey-how-to-teach-chess-to-a-3-year-old-kid/#comments Wed, 28 Jan 2009 01:20:24 +0000 Lior Gradstein http://www.gradstein.info/?p=115 How to teach chess to a 3 year old kid? That’s a good question. I wanted to teach Ido chess for a long time, but each time I tried, he lost focus after 2 minutes, even just for teaching him just rook movements.
I decided I needed to plan it a little more, make it much more fun, and “embed” it in mini-games. It seems to work much better now, but that’s maybe because he matured a lot.

Here are some ideas (some not yet implemented):

  • Using a DIY plastified chess board, allows me to show/play different positions really fast, anywhere.
  • Colorize squares where a piece is allowed to go :

    Array

  • Pawn race games (no en-passant rule yet).
  • Really small games (must not go over 5 minutes) with reduced chess set (for example Queen and 3 pawns vs Knight, bishop and 3 pawns).
  • Checkmate in one, using DiagTransfer program to draw series of chess diagrams. This program works only on Windows, but it works fine with Wine.

    Array

    For quick single diagrams, I found wbeditor, an online javascript diagram generator.

There’s a thread (french) about experience from different teachers, giving really good advices.
Most notably, Véronique Houck who has 15 years of experience of teaching chess to kindergarten/maternelle children. She wrote two books (in french). One is named Bibou & le monde des échecs, and the other one Le jeu d’échecs au cycle2. It’s not so easy to find, but using Google, you can find shows many links.

I’ve not yet read them. I’ll make a review when I get them.

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