Chesscademy, a free chess learning site
chesscademy.com
chesscademy.com
It lets you submit a record of your game and people who are just a bit better players than you are review it and point out obvious (from their point of view) mistakes. Everyone's games are reviewed by someone above them in the ladder, therefore most people are both students and teachers at the same time.
I think it would be possible to use this concept for teaching chess as well, and maybe to some extent even programming.
thanks.
Always keep it specfic to your product value prop. Generic text like "Try it now" never converts as well. Also adding "free" helps.
At the moment, you seem to be looking for audience engagement (as opposed to generating revenue). If that is the case then I'd leave it as is. I read that sort of thing and see it as cute enthusiasm.
I also spent the last two years designing curriculum to teach folks how to program. I have some issues as a student.
I'm currently on the "Sharp Pin" exercise: http://chesscademy.com/exercises/the-sharp-pin-that-piece-is...
I get the basic idea. You have a piece which can't move without exposing a more valuable piece to attack. Here's where I get confused.
There are three pieces involved in this situation: the piece you might want to move, the more valuable piece you would expose, and the piece that would attack. Let's call these pieces M, V, and A, respectively.
It's unclear when you say "X pins Y" which of M, V, and A can go into X and which can go into Y.
Now, if I'm confused about this, look at the hint: "Try pinning the knight to the king"
Pin whose knight to whose king? If I'm confused about the syntax of pinning this hint doesn't help me at all. It's all the more confusing because I'm not sure what you mean by "the" king. There are two kings on the board, right? Which is "the" king? It's worse with "the" knight, since there are four knights on the board.
Now, I spent about 15 minutes parsing out what you meant and saw what was intended. However, I started doing some no-no student things along the way. At first I tried to understand what the sentence meant. I looked at the kings and knights and tried to imagine how one would pin one to the other.
"Pin the knight to the king." Well, the king is the most valuable piece, so it's probably V in this formulation above. But is the knight the M or the A? Now I'm looking at the knights on the board, thinking about moving them around, and I don't see how any move I make could be consistent with the instructions. Hmm, ok, so the knight must be the M which means it must be one of the black knights.
You can see already how I'm not really thinking about the problem but trying to reverse-engineer what you mean. I'm doing this because I don't have a clear picture what "pinning" means in my head.
Now, when I think about moving pieces, I look at the board. What piece should I move? Well, I dunno, the pawns are out there and are near a knight. Maybe that's what pinning means? I'll move the pawns in the center and see if it yells at me. Ok, it yelled at me both times. What other piece could I move? Maybe I was wrong about knights being the M, so let's try all possible knight moves and see if the system lets me make any of those moves. Nope, ok, those are all bad.
Yikes! Now I'm just guessing and relying on your system to tell me what's right or wrong.
Ok, obviously the problem is I'm confused about WTF pinning means. How can I see some examples of pinning? I don't see anywhere on this screen. So, I go to Wikipedia and read the article on pinning. Ah, I see, "X is pinned to Y" means X can't move without exposing Y. So, maybe "Pin X to the Y" means move some piece into a position where "X is pinned to Y."
Ok, well, the knight and the king are lined up diagonally, so the only way the knight could be pinned to the king is by a bishop. Oh, look! Ok, I can move that bishop. Yay! I get the gold star.
This sequence of events is a problem on several levels.
First, most students wouldn't keep at it like I would. They also wouldn't have the self-awareness to see that their first priority is to deconstruct the ideas you're trying to express and reframe them in a way they understand themselves. They most likely wouldn't look to outside resources like Wikipedia, either, because they'd get "tunnel vision" on the current page.
Second, you confused me by talking about absolute and relative pins. I don't know whether I'm going for an absolute or relative pin in this exercise. The hint gives it away, but only by process of elimination. That is, "This must be an absolute pin because otherwise it wouldn't make sense for a king to be involved."
Third, although I eventually get the "right" answer, my path to that answer looks nothing like the path an expert would take. What hint can you give that suggests not just the proper outcome but encourages expert-like habits in the student? I don't know enough chess to suggest, but here are some ideas.
"Think about what moves your various pieces can make. Are there any avenues of attack that line up with those possible moves?"
"To pin the black knight to the black king, you need to move one of your pieces so that it is attacking the knight and would be attacking the king were it not for the knight's position."
This latter hint is nice because it also reinforces previous lessons about attacking, including the forking exercise which also involved attacking two pieces at once. Now I'm relating this current situation to a previous one, and it makes me think there might be some interesting relationships between pinning and forking.
Anyhow, just some thoughts from a guy who spends too much time thinking about curriculum and pedagogy!
This hint is silly. It talks as if I've already made a move, but I haven't made any moves. This is totally confusing.
Update: Ok, I read the Wikipedia article and it mentioned that long-range pieces can skewer. That's interesting. I had never thought of grouping the pieces into long-range and short-range attackers, but that makes total sense. I see now that both pins and skewers are really tactics for long-range pieces. They're ways for you to control parts of the board "at a distance" by forcing your opponent to move or stay put.
There might be situations where a short-range piece could pin or skewer, but I can also see how that would be more precarious. Both pieces being pinned or skewered would have to be close together and the attacking piece would have to be close to both. This means you'd probably be in "enemy territory" and your attacking piece more vulnerable to attack.
With a long-range piece you don't have to worry about any of this. Your opponent would have to enter your territory to halt the pin or the skewer.
That seems like an important distinction to understand. I look back on some of the things I was doing in previous exercise and they make no sense in light of this distinction, e.g., moving pawns around like a monkey trying to pin and skewer things.
This is the curse of expertise. Experts have internalized the most important distinctions so well they're like air. Beginners haven't internalized any distinctions and therefore couldn't possibly see that their struggle is a product of not having them. They can't even express the concept of air.
"Just breath! Inhale! Fill your lungs up!" the expert says, as the beginner coughs and grabs at their throat.
I did all the "moving past the basics" problems apart from the opening moves, and found all but 1 or 2 trivial. The long-winded descriptions didn't really help at all.
Something that might help a ton to grasp the concepts is to provide annotated example boards where the same technique is demonstrated. It feels like a situation that is very accurately described by "a picture is worth a thousand words".
I'm very curious how a beginner would approach a simple ending like King+Rook vs King.
Keep in mind I'm really, really, really far from a "complete beginner" in many ways. I already understand the rules of chess. I've played maybe 50 games of chess in my life, although I've lost nearly every one. I'm a teacher by profession and spend almost all my waking hours thinking about how people learn and implementing that in curriculum. I have a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, which means I've been trained academically to think abstractly and reason about formal systems (e.g., chess).
All this, and I was still incredibly confused bordering on frustrated! Now imagine someone who was really a complete beginner and doesn't have the ability to stop what they're doing and think, "Wait, maybe I should be thinking about this a different way. Let me look up some other information and see if I can relate it to what is happening in front of me." Plenty of students in that situation would instead think, "This is impossible. I can't even guess correctly. I'm terrible at chess."
I'd strongly encourage introducing some broad, strategic distinctions between the various pieces, e.g., long range vs. short range. Whatever is important -- I'm the beginner so I have no idea!
I'd also give better examples. You don't need to do anything complicated.
You want to illustrate "pinning." There are two components to this: the movement of a piece which created a "pinned" situation and the "pinned" situation itself. A novice chess player is told there is a pin, which means they'll look for pieces to move to create a pinning situation. A more expert chess player does the opposite: they evaluate the state of the board and realize that there is a possibility to pin.
So, the goal is really to help novices become better at seeing when it's possible to pin a piece. Imagine a picture like this (I'm going to describe it in words)...
You have a chess board with some "pinnable" situation. Let's take the one from the exercise which involves moving the bishop from f1 to b5. The picture would have the bishop in the b5 position. There would be an arrow emanating from the bishop at b5, going through the knight on c6, and ending at the king on e8. You'd somehow want to label each of the three points. Maybe put a tiny colored dot in each (R,G,B) or the like.
This is meant to represent the state of "bishop b5 pins knight c6 to king e8."
Then have a translucent bishop in f1 with a dotted border. There'd be an arrow with a dotted line pointing from the ghost bishop at f1 to the bishop in b5. This is meant to represent the movement of the bishop from f1 to b5.
Then, next to this image, you would list a bunch of statement which are true about this picture, interweaving chess jargon:
"The <red>bishop</red> pins the <green>knight</green> to the <blue>king</blue>."
"<red>b5 bishop</red> pins <green>c6 knight</green> to <blue>e8 king</blue>."
"Moving the bishop from f1 to b5 pinned c6 knight to e8 king."
"The e8 king is pinned by the c6 knight."
"The c6 knight is pinned to the e8 king."
etc. Just list out phrases and relate them to the image. Modify the image to emphasize the relationship in multiple ways (e.g., coloring the text to match the colors of the appropriate pieces you marked the board with).
Something like this would give me an opportunity to see pinning from every which angle. If one angle was easier for me to understand than the other, that'd be my "entrance point" and I'd then come to understand all the other angles by relating them to the one I really understand.
Also, keep in my that the above suggestions are coming from someone who knows almost nothing about chess. They may or may not be confusing to other novices in ways that I can't see. For example, they might introduce bad habits or ideas that I haven't considered because (as a beginner) I couldn't possibly anticipate them.
For my purposes and for the purposes of the people building this site, I was taking "complete beginner" to mean "never played chess, ever." If you think about it there are many things I know that such a person doesn't, e.g., what it's like to make an ill-considered move.
I knew what pinning and skewering were, for example, although I didn't have a name for them. Learning about pinning for me is putting a name to something I've experienced. A "complete beginner" doesn't have access to that and will be incrementally harder to teach.
That's what I meant, not that 50 games is substantial experience or that I am not a beginner.
Instead, chess is a learned skill, like playing an instrument or maybe speaking a language. It's not that advanced chess players are unusually good at analyzing systems -- the game of chess is far too complex for that. Instead, they build up an intuitive understanding of how the game works based on memory. A good chess player looks at a board and intuitively determines which player is in a better position. This is possible because they have seen that situation, or others like it, before.
That's not to say talent doesn't play a part, but chess-playing ability is mainly a function of games played (at least, at beginner-intermediate-advanced levels).
I don't know what a "learned skill" is, because to me both programming and mathematics are learned skills. What I hear you saying is, "You can't play chess well by thinking like a programmer." That I agree with, for sure! I can't learn to program well by thinking like a mathematician, either.
That said, whether experts can express them consciously or not, there's a set of rules and heuristics by which they're making decisions. They might be incomplete, inconsistent, or highly fit to the circumstances (e.g., when I see this pattern on the board my reflex is to do X, but I don't know why), but they're still there. They might use metaphors and justifications that are foreign to a programmer, but they're still there.
For example, surely some people get better at chess more quickly than others. That is, two players with the same prior chess-playing experience both play N games. One player will probably "learn more" about chess than the other.
Why? Is it just because one player is "smarter" or has a "better intuition?" Because they're better at spotting and internalizing patterns? What does that mean? What is the faster learner doing that the slower learner isn't?
To me "intuition" is just a habit we've internalized so deeply it's hard to express in words. I'm not sure what the right level of abstraction or the right metaphors for thinking about chess are, but I imagine thinking about it in terms of territory, optionality, exposure, momentum, etc. are the most useful. I could be wrong.
My point was more that whatever a good frame of mind is, it's more effective to focus on the frame of mind and train beginners to adopt the habits of that frame of mind explicitly than it is to teach them through a million isolated examples and trust that they'll learn the most appropriate generalizations.
To take pinning, for example, we might start by talking about short-range and long-range tactics. Here's my rough draft of an explanation. Keep in mind I know virtually nothing about chess and my suggestions about what to practice might be actively developing bad habits! Hopefully you get the idea, though.
Sometimes you want to be able to influence your opponent from a distance so that your pieces are less exposed. The queen, rook, and bishop are the three pieces capable of doing this because they can move an unlimited number of spaces in at least one direction. The other pieces are limited in their movement and therefore can't exert control from a distance.
Pinning is one example of a long range tactic where one of our long-range pieces threatens a low-value piece, but the opponent can't move it without exposing a higher-value piece. For example, your bishop might be lined up to attack the opponent's queen, but one of the opponent's knights is blocking the way. In this situation your opponent can't move their knight without opening up their queen to attack. We'd say that the "bishop is pinning the knight to the queen" or "the knight is pinned to the queen by the bishop."
As a beginner it will take time to internalize all the moving parts of pinning. Remembering which pieces are worth more and recalling that without thinking takes time. Seeing patterns on the board without "manually" going through each possibility will take time. Go easy on yourself and take it slow. Don't get frustrated when you miss a chance to pin a piece. You'll develop good habits over time if you're deliberate in your approach.
To start, here's a board. Look for high value pieces and see if they're exposed in any of the directions that would be open to attack by a queen, rook, or bishop if those pieces were placed appropriately. Also look at your queen, rooks, and bishops to see where they can move. Are they able to move in a place that threatens any high-value pieces if there were no other pieces on the board?
These are your potential opportunities for pinning.
If you practice this over and over it'll become a habit and will stop feeling like "manual labor."
Take a look at this board and go through the process above. Is there some piece you can move which will pin an opponent's knight to their king? Are there any other opportunities to pin on the board? You can only make one move: if you had to choose between the various opportunities to pin, which would you choose and why? Can you see any advantages or disadvantages between the opportunities you have to pin an opponent's piece?
It's ok if you can't or if you think your reasons are no good. Give your best effort and keep in mind that your reasons might not be good reasons or the reasons an expert would give. You'll develop instincts for how to evaluate multiple possible moves as time goes on.
Would be nice I guess to show why b5 is a bad pin
BTW, thanks for the great resource.
[1] http://chesscademy.com/videos/stages-of-the-game-an-overview...
Feedback: You could use some work on your marketing message/brand. Chess has some much potential for interesting plays on the black/white concept and terminology. "More than just black and white.","Checkmate.". These are iconic chess ideas that I think if executed right, could add a the missing piece to the message you are trying to send.
I think the flat-ui is actually holding you back and with a few more iterations on your brand you could have a really unique presence. If you want to talk more, my email is in my profile. Hope this helps!
ex: http://www.cardrunners.com/ http://www.deucescracked.com/ http://www.bluefirepoker.com/
Alternately I'd be excited to see a new business model for this kind of game training site.
Definitely some possibilities though! Makes me want to try and actually get decent at chess, but it's so much work...
A couple of suggestions:
a) Have a goal in the exercises explicitly shown to the user (mate in 4, material advantage, winning end game, etc.)
b) Please, please proof-check your exercises. At least have a link to report bad ones.
One comment: the lone King in the King+Rook endgame wasn't as defensive as it could have been - and therefore learners could miss some tactics here.
I've spent loads of fun time practicing tactics at http://chesstempo.com/chess-tactics.html
Otherwise, great and I like the one video I watched. Thanks.
Please developpers, hire actual designers. Using the same theme everybody uses will make your product forgettable.
chesscafe.com - a great collection of articles (including instruction) on chess
running throw some your basic tutorials and the quizez take huge amount of time to load.
You know there are variants right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_chess
Being great at one style doesn't normally mean you will be good at the others...
And just to throw around some unprovable opions, much like you, I declare that Starcraft becomes more a test of keyboard/mouse agility than strategy or tactics, because it has dominant strategies available for a master player.
Back to chess, I think it is actually entering a golden era of interest and popularity. The last 2 decades at the top level have been dominated by opening theory and computer assisted home preparation, which has made it a hard slog for the professional and spectator. However the last 5 years or so have seen the emergence of a new breed of player that is shunning that approach. The number one player in the world is a prime example of someone who doesn't focus on opening theory and computer assisted preparation, and he has been blowing everyone away.