Chess becomes life teachers

Hands up who disagrees that chess is a good way to develop cognitive and mnemonic properties! We read it everywhere continuously since the days when the "noble game" was born.

It is even said that great leaders of past times used the game of chess to develop the ability to organize attack plans to be used in battles for territorial conquests. For seven years, however, there has been a novelty: the European Union with the "Written Declaration 50/2011" approved on March 15, 2012 promotes the chess activity "at the curricular level", or invites to use chess as a subject to teach in school time.

The forerunner nation is Spain where, starting in 2015, the Rajoy government has decided to equip schools with chess and chess boards so that their students can develop intelligence, train the mind and thus improve their performance. In Italy, the CASTLE project developed in partnership with some schools in Spain and Germany, starting in 2015, which aims to follow and validate the guidelines of the 2012 European Declaration with field experiments.

The results of the CASTLE trial, (an acronym from the initials of Chess Curriculum to Advance Students "Thinking and Learning Skills in Primary Education) were very positive. Teachers have been trained to develop and promote chess at school together with other colleagues, and children capable of developing motor activities at the board level in the first few years and at a more transversal level of collaboration and relationship between them.

A tool to make us capable of developing our abilities, concentration, patience, perseverance, critical and decision-making skills, strategy development but also creativity and intuition.

The FSI Italian chess federation and also the FIDE, the world chess federation are also part of the CASTLE project. There are also future projects in collaboration with American realities, which analyze the therapeutic properties of the game of chess to be used as a psychological stimulus in patients.

What more can we say? Let your children play chess!