TicTacToeTen, Education, & Learning Pt. 2

I am keeping the research ball rolling on this project and this time we'll dive into real world implementations of Chess curricula. We will then see how many of these concepts might be able to be ported over to my game of Tic Tac Toe Ten.

So to start it off I used a couple more articles as reference: one from the New York Times and one from Chess For Education.

In the last post, I convinced myself (and you too hopefully) that a game like Tic Tac Toe Ten could do positive things for students if adopted by their school districts. I'm using the fact that Tic Tac Toe Ten parallels Chess in many ways and the fact that Chess has been tied to raised IQ, better concentration, improved critical thinking, and a number of other things for people who play (especially kids). So now that we're convinced that it can positively impact our audience what do we do?

Well the New York Times article pointed out how the state of Idaho implemented Chess education programming for their 2nd and 3rd graders state wide. The state's education budget for this particular year (2008) was $1.5 billion dollars. It was estimated that it would take $250,000 to deploy the program statewide to the 40,000 2nd and 3rd graders. First Move, a program provided by America's Foundation for Chess, was used to give instructional materials (chess boards and pieces, DVDs, online manuals and resources, etc.) and training to classroom teachers on how to deliver this to their students.

I imagine that a 1 or 2 day conference was delivered and that the necessary knowledge transfer happened pretty quickly. Classroom teachers need to know how the new information integrates with the existing objectives and also how to troubleshoot when roadblocks come up (e.g. language barriers) The materials were then handed off and the teachers were empowered to go out and change their classrooms. So for Tic Tac Toe Ten to be embedded into curriculum from a 2nd-8th grade level, I'd need to put together the board sets (board, pieces, clocks, instructions) an instructional DVD, an online manual, and a small support team. I'd have to get in touch with heads of state education departments to broker deals on the materials and trainings as well. After that it would be all about creating new goods and services on top of the existing platform to enhance the learning that was already going on.

With Idaho being such a small state, the dollars that could be made if this should get approved by larger states would be pretty big. The challenges ahead have to do with differentiating content across grades. Targeting products according to grade level would take a little more research, but should be doable. We could break into 3 categories for 2nd-8th grades (2-3, 4-5, 6-8) and work on special content that would be relevant to each of these categories in logic, math and vocabulary.

that's all for this episode but stay tuned for more soon,

B.M.