Chess for common development: the history of the development program
All my life I have had two parallel professional interests: programming (and computers in a broader sense), and psychology. When I worked as a psychologist in state educational institutions, my life was very meaningful, I felt that I was bringing good to the world (and I am ready to say that I brought it to some individuals), but I didn’t have the clarity of thinking, IT’s -shnika When I worked as a programmer, there were no problems with tasks and money, but I was stifled by the feeling of total senselessness from the need to solve other people's tasks, to work for other people’s goals that were not connected with my personal sense of the need to bring good into the world (whatever that means) .
But once I was very lucky - I was involved in the project "Chess for common development", where I still combine the duties of a programmer, a psychologist, a school teacher, and many more. This is what I want to tell.
Three years ago, on a psychological get-together, Professor V.K. Zaretsky and said, "Alex, let's have to do a chess program." I agreed, and we started to invent a program that allows students to solve chess problems on a checkmate in one move.
Immediately, I note that there are a huge number of chess programs, but they all implement the same approach to learning - the user is asked to solve puzzles or play against the computer on a virtual chessboard, while the program is usually ready to helpfully suggest the strongest move, that's all. Learn how to play chess. Professor Zaretsky, on the other hand, was engaged in (and continues to be engaged in) human development, and uses chess material as a basis for developing the ability to act in the mind. Not just to make a chess move in your mind, but in a broader sense - to learn to see yourself from outside, to plan your own activities (first of all learning, because he works with schoolchildren, but not only her). Psychologists call this the phrase “reflection of one’s own activity”. And as a programmer, I was assigned the corresponding task - to design such a program that would allow me not only to solve chess problems, but somehow also work on developing the user's ability to analyze his own actions.
If someone is interested in the psychological side of the method, I will be happy to tell you in detail in personal correspondence (since the subject matter of the resource is different), and in the article I will focus on the general description of the program, as well as on some technical details and nuances.
Since the use of the program was planned in various schools in the country and abroad, the format of the web application was immediately chosen. Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, JavaScript, Heroku. Substantially, the program is divided into two parts - the problem itself (at the moment these tasks are six stages) and the wrapper (creation of teachers and their classes, students, statistics, instructions, etc.).
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An unexpected problem was the need to identify students in the program, because not every first grader has an e-mail address, but it is necessary to distinguish them somehow. Therefore, it was decided to identify teachers according to the standard scheme of e-mail + password, and students to issue in a special way the generated unique keys (which they should write themselves in a diary and never lose).
At the moment, the program includes six stages of tasks, each of which consists of several types, and in total offers 167 levels of difficulty. The main psychological ideas that defined the implementation are stepwise advancement from simple to complex and at the same time movement in solving problems from a large number of material supports (in other words, various tools that facilitate the solution) to work in an “ideal” plan (that is, when a student sees a blank outline of a chessboard, and must perform all the necessary operations in the mind).
The progress from the material to the ideal mental action plan can be illustrated by the following pictures from the first phase of the program.
Stage 1 is called “Tasks to select a field from the plane of the board”, and is aimed at developing the simplest ability to allocate a board field to a specified address, as well as perform the reverse operation (call the address of a specific field). In the tasks of the first type "Field Color" you need to learn how to find a field at an address and correctly name its color. Primary school students of this type of assignments are very popular, the kids are delighted, they sit for hours in completing these simple tasks.
On the first level of complexity (the first picture) you need to lay a green path from the a1 field to the desired field (in this case e3), on the third level you need to immediately mark the field with a black and white chip, on the fifth you need to do the same, but the board is on the screen lacking signatures, level 7 deprives the board of coloring, and level 8 is simply an empty square (and the task remains the same - to determine the color of the field). Of course, the target field is randomly generated each time.
For example, can you name the a1 field with your eyes closed? And the f6 field? But a songwriter who has worked with our program will be able to!
Here is a list of all stages of the program:
Stage 1. Tasks to select a field from the plane of the board.
Stage 2. Tasks to select a line from the plane of the board.
Stage 3. Tasks to select the configuration of fields.
Stage 4. Tasks to find the field of intersection of lines.
Stage 5. Tasks for mate in one move.
Stage 6. Tasks for mate in two moves.
The logic of the gradual transfer of mental action from the material to the ideal plan is preserved in all types of tasks on all the phases of the program. The first stage is usually easily performed by first-graders for several lessons, the tasks of the sixth stage sometimes cause difficulties for grandmasters.
The tasks of the first four stages are not chess in the strict sense, and are generated in the browser during execution, the tasks of stages 5 and 6 are entered into the program using a special task editor and stored in the database. In the pictures below you can see examples of decision trees for the problem of checkmate in one move and checkmate in two moves, respectively.
Currently, the program is widely used in schools, colleges, universities and other educational and medical institutions in Moscow, as well as in Quebec (Canada) and some other cities around the world, as well as work is underway to translate the program interface into French (in addition to English and German). People who systematically work with the program speak not only about improving their own chess competence, but also about improving the perception of the traffic situation (“I began to see outcomes in 3D”), and about the developed ability to memorize a sequence of 20 numbers from one time, there are even reports "I began to plan my life better." However, while these are preliminary results, in the future we plan to conduct a fundamental psychological study of the effect of working with the program on different age groups.
I will be happy to answer any questions about the technical structure of the program, as well as about the psychological component (if it seems interesting to someone).
But once I was very lucky - I was involved in the project "Chess for common development", where I still combine the duties of a programmer, a psychologist, a school teacher, and many more. This is what I want to tell.
Three years ago, on a psychological get-together, Professor V.K. Zaretsky and said, "Alex, let's have to do a chess program." I agreed, and we started to invent a program that allows students to solve chess problems on a checkmate in one move.
Immediately, I note that there are a huge number of chess programs, but they all implement the same approach to learning - the user is asked to solve puzzles or play against the computer on a virtual chessboard, while the program is usually ready to helpfully suggest the strongest move, that's all. Learn how to play chess. Professor Zaretsky, on the other hand, was engaged in (and continues to be engaged in) human development, and uses chess material as a basis for developing the ability to act in the mind. Not just to make a chess move in your mind, but in a broader sense - to learn to see yourself from outside, to plan your own activities (first of all learning, because he works with schoolchildren, but not only her). Psychologists call this the phrase “reflection of one’s own activity”. And as a programmer, I was assigned the corresponding task - to design such a program that would allow me not only to solve chess problems, but somehow also work on developing the user's ability to analyze his own actions.
If someone is interested in the psychological side of the method, I will be happy to tell you in detail in personal correspondence (since the subject matter of the resource is different), and in the article I will focus on the general description of the program, as well as on some technical details and nuances.
Since the use of the program was planned in various schools in the country and abroad, the format of the web application was immediately chosen. Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, JavaScript, Heroku. Substantially, the program is divided into two parts - the problem itself (at the moment these tasks are six stages) and the wrapper (creation of teachers and their classes, students, statistics, instructions, etc.).
')
An unexpected problem was the need to identify students in the program, because not every first grader has an e-mail address, but it is necessary to distinguish them somehow. Therefore, it was decided to identify teachers according to the standard scheme of e-mail + password, and students to issue in a special way the generated unique keys (which they should write themselves in a diary and never lose).
At the moment, the program includes six stages of tasks, each of which consists of several types, and in total offers 167 levels of difficulty. The main psychological ideas that defined the implementation are stepwise advancement from simple to complex and at the same time movement in solving problems from a large number of material supports (in other words, various tools that facilitate the solution) to work in an “ideal” plan (that is, when a student sees a blank outline of a chessboard, and must perform all the necessary operations in the mind).
The progress from the material to the ideal mental action plan can be illustrated by the following pictures from the first phase of the program.
Stage 1 is called “Tasks to select a field from the plane of the board”, and is aimed at developing the simplest ability to allocate a board field to a specified address, as well as perform the reverse operation (call the address of a specific field). In the tasks of the first type "Field Color" you need to learn how to find a field at an address and correctly name its color. Primary school students of this type of assignments are very popular, the kids are delighted, they sit for hours in completing these simple tasks.
On the first level of complexity (the first picture) you need to lay a green path from the a1 field to the desired field (in this case e3), on the third level you need to immediately mark the field with a black and white chip, on the fifth you need to do the same, but the board is on the screen lacking signatures, level 7 deprives the board of coloring, and level 8 is simply an empty square (and the task remains the same - to determine the color of the field). Of course, the target field is randomly generated each time.
For example, can you name the a1 field with your eyes closed? And the f6 field? But a songwriter who has worked with our program will be able to!
Here is a list of all stages of the program:
Stage 1. Tasks to select a field from the plane of the board.
Stage 2. Tasks to select a line from the plane of the board.
Stage 3. Tasks to select the configuration of fields.
Stage 4. Tasks to find the field of intersection of lines.
Stage 5. Tasks for mate in one move.
Stage 6. Tasks for mate in two moves.
The logic of the gradual transfer of mental action from the material to the ideal plan is preserved in all types of tasks on all the phases of the program. The first stage is usually easily performed by first-graders for several lessons, the tasks of the sixth stage sometimes cause difficulties for grandmasters.
The tasks of the first four stages are not chess in the strict sense, and are generated in the browser during execution, the tasks of stages 5 and 6 are entered into the program using a special task editor and stored in the database. In the pictures below you can see examples of decision trees for the problem of checkmate in one move and checkmate in two moves, respectively.
Currently, the program is widely used in schools, colleges, universities and other educational and medical institutions in Moscow, as well as in Quebec (Canada) and some other cities around the world, as well as work is underway to translate the program interface into French (in addition to English and German). People who systematically work with the program speak not only about improving their own chess competence, but also about improving the perception of the traffic situation (“I began to see outcomes in 3D”), and about the developed ability to memorize a sequence of 20 numbers from one time, there are even reports "I began to plan my life better." However, while these are preliminary results, in the future we plan to conduct a fundamental psychological study of the effect of working with the program on different age groups.
I will be happy to answer any questions about the technical structure of the program, as well as about the psychological component (if it seems interesting to someone).
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/340632/
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