Teaching Go to Kids
Bruce Grant
of the PC-based Go programs (e.g. Nemesis)? This way the adult player
could make suggestions and also let the kid see what happens when he/she
does different things. (Programs that can be "dumbed down" might be
particularly good for this.)
Dane Hendrix
where we take turns putting stone on the board. We haven't gotten
to captures or anything of the sort. I've tried to get him to play on
a 9x9 board, but he prefers 19x19.
What are others experiences?
Dane Hendrix | email: da...@yutai.dt.navy.mil
DTMB (a.k.a. Headquarters, Carderock Div.,| or hen...@oasys.dt.navy.mil
Naval Surface Warfare Center) | or hen...@nas.nasa.gov
Code 1542, Bethesda, MD 20084-5000 | phone: (301)227-1340
Adrian Mariano
discussion:
4495 children.Z Article about teaching children to play
(Ftp to ftp.u.washington.edu and cd public/go)
Martti Tolvanen
>I have a three year old who I've succeeded at getting to the point with
>where we take turns putting stone on the board. We haven't gotten
>to captures or anything of the sort. I've tried to get him to play on
>a 9x9 board, but he prefers 19x19.
>What are others experiences?
My little girl, who just turned five, used to prefer 19x19, but now that
she knows what the game is about, she enjoys being able to finish the
game more quickly on 9x9. I've taught her on about 10 occasions and she
knows pretty well what is capturing, escaping and linking, but the idea
of making territory seems a bit vague, although she knows that territory
is what is counted in the end. As to her strength, I'm 15 kyu, and now
we play close games with 5 stones handicap on 9x9.
--
Martti Tolvanen, Dept. Biochem., Univ. Helsinki, Finland
tolv...@cc.helsinki.fi
Rick Busdiecker
>What are others experiences?
My experience has been similar. My son is two and a half. He tends
to prefer the 19x19 board and can usually deal well with taking turns
placing stones on the board. He seems to get most of his enjoyment
from trying to hold a stone between his index and middle finger and
putting the stones away -- he often says `clean up' 10 or 15 moves
into a game. I've tried giving him handicap stones, but that's more
likely to make him want to play handfuls of stones at a time.
I've also got a 6-year-old daughter who started out playing the same
way that my son plays. She now has a pretty good feeling for the
rules of the game and is starting understand strategy a bit. She
prefers playing on a 13x13 now and we usually talk about each move a
bit. She gets frustrated by not getting as much territory with the
patters that she wants to make as she gets with my recommendations.
Sometimes she goes with the recommendations and sometimes she doesn't.
I try to present them as only recommendations, explaining how I arrive
at them, and to avoid saying that moves are necessarily `right' or
`wrong'. I play at around 11 or 12 kyu and she typically takes 5
stones on a 13x13 board. Game results vary a lot. Sometimes, we talk
through a game and she takes a lot of my recommendations and beats me
by 40 points or more. Other times she loses by similar margins.
My general approach to playing go with my children is that go makes
use of cognitive skills that are under development and that the most
important thing early on is to maintain interest by making it fun.
Because of this, I try to teach the `regular rules', but allow for
variations, especially when the child suggests the variation. I also
try to be very flexible about taking back moves. I don't usually
throw games intentionally, but I try to make it possible for my
daughter to win often. When she's seriously behind, we often just
`start over' without any talk of resigning the game. When she wins, I
make a point of carefully counting out the score and emphasizing how
much she won by.
--
Rick Busdiecker <rf...@cs.cmu.edu>
``I hate quotations.'' -- Ralph Waldo Emerson