Food for Thought: Software's Think Like a King.
by Mitchell Levine
Although it may be true, as Edgar Allen Poe wrote, that "the greatest Chess player in the world may just be the greatest player of Chess," that doesn't mean the game can't provide student participants with extensive benefits off the board also. In fact, numerous studies have found that children that master it also gain superior skills in memory, concentration, logical reasoning, and foresight. While everyone in education would certainly love to see that happen, not every well-intentioned district has the services of grandmasters to teach, or professional organizers to administrate.
Thanks to the Think Like a King software suite, however, just about every New York City school can now take advantage of all the perks the "Royal Game" has to offer. A modular system, Think Like a King is comprised of a series of individual programs, each of which can offer support, from basic tournament enterprise management-a component called "Chess Club Manager"-to instruction and examination.
The Chess Club Manager unit essentially does exactly that, providing all the necessary functions to run a scholastic chess club: it calculates and documents rating systems and rankings, records game outcomes grouped by grade and division, prints forms and rosters, and much more. Although these basics would be worth the price alone, the suite goes a lot further. It can integrate chess videos and instruction, for example. I particularly enjoyed the curricula in the Chess Work-out series, and I haven't been eligible to join a scholastic league in twenty years! One nice feature is the point system of evaluation-more concrete than that offered by the similar series of challenges in the excellent Chess Mentor series-which not only allows an instructor to monitor a pupil's progress through the lesson plans, but even prints awards certificates to commemorate exceptional achievement
There's an expression in Sanskrit that "Chess is a stream in which a tick can bathe, and an elephant can drown!" A scholastic chess teacher has to be able to accommodate both. The Think Like a King software package is a powerful tool to just that. Log on to the companies site at www.schoolchess.com, and see why the United States Chess Federation, the governing body of American Chess, has selected it as its official software.#
