I have played chess for a larger part of my life and the society has now come to define me by it. I believe that my experience with the game offers me an opportunity to make meaningful contributions regarding its positives, since I hardly see how the game can have the negatives. One might perceive that as imbalance reporting but I will have to seek your absolvence in advance. As it is, I will be at pains to look for some disadvantages of playing the game of chess.
This being an educational column, I will discuss chess from the educational point of view. I am for the argument that chess and education are soul mates. Much as I am not privy to any research done locally to substantiate my view, but simple studies conducted in places like the United States and Armenia suggest that the game has more cognitive development impact on learners than all other disciplines. Inherent in the game of chess are the basic principles of psychological learning theory such as memory improvement, pattern recognition, decision making and reinforcement. Positional configurations, anticipated piece movements, diagonals, ranks and files make some deep impressions on that area of the mind which is responsible for memory. In his publishing, May 2017, John Artise emphasised this by saying that visual stimuli tends to improve memory more than any other stimuli. As chess offers that opportunity for visualization, it therefore serves well in this area. Chess is definitely an excellent memory exerciser, the effects of which are transferable to other subjects where memory is necessary.
