José Luis Picón I Málaga, (EFE).- Chess in the classroom has become a tenant, becoming a didactic tool that connects to mathematics, literature, history or art and can also raise awareness among students to gender equality or against bullying.
This is possible thanks to the ulaDjaque program, which reaches its sixth edition with record numbers of some seven hundred Andalusian educational centers attached, which means that this course will reach 10,000 teachers and 150,000 students, explained its coordinator in an interview with EFE , Manuel Azuaga.
These figures place this initiative promoted by the Andalusian Ministry of Educational Development and Vocational Training as a program without comparison at the international level and as a model which is exported, and for example its managers are in contact with a Uruguayan university interested in develop .
According to Azuaga, one of the main bets this year will be “transversality”, and among the novelties is its adaptation to LOMLOE Education Acta section that includes “learning situations in which classroom chess has a place.”
playground experiences
For example, realities of life or bullying experiences are simulated in a recreation, which is like a chessboard, and who the bully is is identified, and in terms of equality, it is highlighted how the queen is the most valuable coin, “something perhaps influenced in Spain by Queen Isabella the Catholic.”
In the module devoted to equality, the figure of pioneering female chess players is also disseminated, such as Vera Menchik or Sonja Graf, “who faced men on the chessboard for the first time”, underlined the coordinator.
The game of chess is also shown “as an example of overcoming” and “allows a historical, literary and cultural transversality which makes it possible to take charge of almost all subjects”, explains Azuaga.
“The relationship with Mathematics is the most obvious, there is a direct relationship with this Cartesian board with its 64 squares, and there are even those who say that it is not that chess resembles Mathematics, but that this are Mathematics.
It also allows working with students with autism spectrum disorders (ATE), with students in educational compensation or with specific classrooms.
Tournaments that favor encounters
During this academic year, the second edition of the International Congress of Chess and Pedagogy of the Djaque class will also be held and the inter-center tournament will be repeated, which wants to privilege the condition of meeting between students on the competitive character, for which he will award, for example, a prize “for the most beautiful game”.
This educational program has not missed its appointment even in the pandemic, when “it was an almost emotional connection tool with students through play, even if they were at home”.
“Chess has 1,500 years of documented history and that allows us to draw on many passages. It has accompanied humanity for so many centuries, that we even went through a recent pandemic with it,” Azuaga points out. ECE
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