The CSC Curriculum
CSC has taught over 250,000 children how to play chess, along with many thousands of adults in our library, community, and prison clubs. The vast majority of these people were completely new to chess when they began our programme. Our award-winning curriculum assumes no prior knowledge of chess and introduces the game gradually over 30 weeks. The curriculum is designed for use in primary schools but is easily adapted to other settings or for shorter courses.
Mini-games
CSC uses a series of mini-games to teach the movement of each piece, one at a time. We start with the pawn, explaining how the pawn moves and then encouraging our students to play Capture the Flag, a mini-game involving eight pawns on each side. To win the game, a player needs to either:
move a pawn to the far side of the board,
capture all their opponents' pawns, or
block the position so their opponent cannot move.
While the rules of Capture the Flag are straight-forward, it is certainly not a simple game. As well as reinforcing the pawn move, the game also teaches players about defending their pieces and even sacrificing them to achieve victory. For more advanced players, spatial advantages and even Zugzwang can play a part.
After introducing the pawn move with Capture the Flag, we proceed to teach a new piece each week: the rook, bishop, queen, and knight. Each piece has its own mini-game. Only then, when our students' knowledge of the movement of these pieces is secure, do we introduce the king and the more challenging concepts of check and checkmate.
By breaking down chess into a series of mini-games, we avoid overloading our students with a large amount of upfront information they might struggle to retain. Each game takes just a few minutes to introduce, allowing our students to learn through play.
Learning through play
We firmly believe that the best way to learn chess is by playing the game. In our classroom lessons, our tutors will typically start the session by recapping the previous week's learning, introducing some new material and giving the children some chess-based exercises from our workbooks to complete. After that, roughly half the lesson is devoted to the children practising their skills by playing our mini-games or full games of chess. While they're playing, the children learn from their opponents, through their own mistakes, and from coaching tips from our tutors.
The CSC Curriculum
Our curriculum is naturally divided into three terms:
Term 1 - the basic rules of chess
Term 2 - what makes a good move and simple checkmates
Term 3 - basic tactics (forks, pins, skewers) and checkmating techniques
The curriculum delivers a large amount of maths content, particularly relevant to children in primary schools. You can read about maths in our curriculum here. In addition, our workbooks make use of chess-based logic puzzles to embed the material being taught in each lesson.
If you would like access to our curriculum for primary schools, designed for whole-class teaching, please contact us here. A more accessible version, aimed at teaching individual students how to play chess, can be found on our Chess at Home page.
