How To Run ChessKid Events Online
Schools, activities, and afterschool chess clubs all over the world are being affected by the spread of Corona virus. ChessKid has been receiving requests from near and far by programs seeking to host events and lessons online as replacements to in-person gatherings.Good news: We can help you!
In addition to the innovative Classroom Lesson Planner, we have many other tools for online instruction and fun. Below you'll find many ideas and features available on ChessKid to keep students learning chess during these difficult times.
1. Host a live tournament online
2. Host a Puzzle Duel competition among your students
3. Host a week-long club leaderboard competition
4. Give a live interactive club lesson
5. Have a "Beat the Teacher" competition in fast chess
7. Have your kids watch the ChessKid live streams
1. Host a live tournament online
This will be option number one for most programs! You can have a handful or even several hundred kids playing at the same time. As you can see in this article, you can set up any time control you want, and any number of rounds.
Remember that all tournaments take place within a club. Kids must play on the web and not the apps and here's a great article to send kids about how to join a live tournament that you have created. Also, if a child is using a computer and has not updated the browser in a while, you may want to advise ChessKids to clear your browser's cache before entering a tournament.
2. Host a Puzzle Duel competition among your students
What's even more fun that doing puzzles? How about a one-on-one race to see who can solve puzzles the fastest? That's what Puzzle Duel is all about! If any two kids in your account are playing Puzzle Duel at the same time, they can challenge each other directly (you can always play a random opponent).
There's a link to Puzzle Duel right from a kid's home screen. Also, we recently added new features like leaderboards and rankings!
3. Host a week-long club leaderboard competition
If you have any club, then you have a leaderboard! Note that for our large programs using an enterprise account, then a "group" leaderboard serves the same function. Scroll down to bottom of this article for more information on creative uses of the leaderboard.
A leaderboard automatically keeps track of stats like "most puzzles solved" or "most fast chess games won." You can sort the stats for last seven days and therefore track any week-long competition. You can advertise this in any internal communication methods, or use the "club/group" message function on ChessKid to let kids know what the competition is that week!
4. Give a live interactive club lesson
For safety reasons, ChessKid does not have any live communication features, but if you want to mimic an afterschool chess club session, that would be easy using a third-party program like Zoom or GoToMeeting. These programs allow you to have many kids join a virtual classroom and be able to respond to your questions verbally or in the chat.
Need a digital "demo" board to import a game or set up any position and play it out? Just turn on screen share and check out the brand new ChessKid analysis board!
You can also use ChessKid's videos and lessons to teach the kids. Or, just follow our handy lesson planner, which outlines all of the teaching for a 30-lesson course. You can even review one of your student's games using the "analyze" feature in a child's game history.
When your lesson is over, it is simple to then instruct the kids to go play each other in Fast Chess, just as they would get the chess pieces out in a normal chess club session! Best of all, you as the adult guardian can "view" any games being played in real time by kids in your account.
5. Have a "Beat the Teacher" competition in fast chess
The one is pretty simple and ChessKids love it. You just have to inform your students what time you will be in fast chess ("Play vs Kid"). If they show up there at the same time, they can challenge the teacher (you as an adult cannot play random kids on ChessKid but you can play any students in your account in a live game using the "friends" tab).
A warning: If you are advertise this well (internally or through the ChessKid club message feature), when you arrive in Fast Chess ("Play vs Kid"), you may hear "ping, ping, ping" from all the students who have been waiting to issue you a challenge! Although you can only play one student at a time, the others can watch your game live and wait their turn.
6. Host a "Bots Challenge"
ChessKids love our animated bots. Our cyborgs always there waiting to play, and they have unlimited energy. There are 10 levels ranging from Qwerty to Megahertz.
For this challenge, give your students a certain amount of time to see how many levels they can beat in order. You can check their report card to see how successful they were.
It is very hard to beat the upper levels, and so an additional challenge would be to ask the kids who can play the longest game against level 10, Megahertz! You'll be able to check this too in a child's game history, which also saves games played against bots.
7. Have your kids watch the ChessKid live streams
Find the broadcast schedule on our Events Calendar!
Several times per week, ChessKid hosts live events, usually on Chess.com/TV, twitch.tv/chesskid and our ChessKid YouTube stream. This is usually FunMasterMike and friends playing kids and having fun while commenting on the games - plus we've added more special guests, top kid players & Spanish language streams!
Tune in for "Beat FunMasterMike" with FM Mike Klein, "FunMasterMike and the Brewmaster" with NM Brewington Hardaway, "Alice's Pawn Palace" with NM Alice Lee, "Blazing Bishop Battles" with coach Liam Murphy, "Draw the Squirrel" with IM David Pruess, "Vence a la Maestra Ive" with WIM Ivette Garcia, "Conoce ChessKid," "Faustino el pequeño gigante," each month's ChessKid Monthly Championship and much more!
To stay up to date on the latest schedule of upcoming shows (and to have your kids have the best chance to play FunMasterMike), visit our events calendar. You can also follow ChessKid on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Additionally, there's an "Official ChessKid Club" on Chess.com which you can join if you have an account there.
If you have any questions about any of these activities, please email [email protected] and we will be glad to help!