Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Summer Doldrums

The local chess tournaments have ended for the year. They'll restart next academic year but it looks like there will be fewer opportunities for the kids to play this summer. This may be a good thing because lately, Richie has shown more interest in non-chess activities. I think his loss of interest coincided with his growing interest in video games (we've had a game system for awhile but only recently has he started playing it much). With respect to chess I fear that it got a little too easy for him to win trophies so he's not really motivated to find better ways of playing. I suppose the novelty has worn off a bit too. Alyssa actually has come around to chess and still enjoys solving mate-in-N problems (and prefers puzzles to actual games).

They'll be spending around 6 weeks in Thailand this summer with my wife so that's going to be a natural break for them. I plan to set them up Yahoo accounts so I can play with them over the internet but I don't know if they'll actually do it.

2 comments:

Scott T. said...

I just ran across your blog while in the process of building mine. I teach the students at my elementary students how to play chess and they have been doing pretty well. I thought what you said about your son losing interest was interesting - I have come across the same thing with my students -winning being too easy for some and too hard for others.

I just uploaded a comic to my new blog "The Chess Comic: Learning Chess Through Comics" I'm not an artist (as you will see if you check it out), but the idea came to me and I thought it might work.

Scott

Koji said...

Yes, it is hard to keep the kids interest for sure. I will make a post soon about a "trick" I used which seemed to work, at least temporarily...

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