Ho Math Chess Research and Articles > Maximize Educational Value of Chess

child education franchise
5 Aug 2007

Maximize Educational Value of Chess
By Frank Ho
Teacher at Ho Math and Chess Learning Centre
Research papers have demonstrated chess offers educational value for children in many areas and one of them is math ability improvement. However the benefit of enhancing math ability seems to more concentrate in the critical thinking or problem solving skill. There is no strong evidence or explanations on how chess could actually benefit children in computation ability. The problem stems from the fact that all these research experiments do not truly integrate chess knowledge into math curriculum, instead math and chess are taught separately and student worked on these 2 subjects separately in perhaps different time periods. So even though chess was taught to children but there was no real integration between chess and math so while we know there is a relation between chess and math, children did not get the benefits of the synergy between chess and math since chess and math were taught as 2 separate subjects to children.
To understand the true relation between chess and math, children need to work on math and chess integrated workbook using both chess and math knowledge. Only by working on the math and chess integrated workbooks, can children really get the benefits of synergetic benefits of the integration of chess and math. The was no math and chess truly integrated workbook for elementary students to work on until Frank Ho, a Canadian math teacher, created the world’s first math and chess truly integrated workbook using his invention of SCL (Symbolic Chess Language). SCL provides the true link between chess and math in such a way that simple boring and perhaps repetitive computation questions can become puzzle-like, multi-step and symbolic questions. Not only children get opportunities to hone their computational skill, these types of questions also provide mental entertainment for them. Children learn best while having fun.
More details on math and chess integrated teaching method, please visit www.mathandchess.com.

Frank Ho