❓ Kids and Conceptualization? (Q&A)

0:00Hi, it's Aiden. Welcome to a Saturday Q&A episode here on the podcast. It's our chance to connect the various things we talk about here into your individual experiences, answer your questions. If you have a question, I'm sure a bunch of other people listening to this do as well. So please send them through to Aiden at don't move until you see dot it. That's AIDN. At don't move until you see dot it would be fantastic to hear from you. Today's question comes from Thomas and he says, hi there. Luckily, both my kids have caught the chess bug. Nine and 11 years old and suddenly very serious about beating me, which is going well for them, unfortunately. I've been working through your approach for my own game and it's genuinely helped, but the whole framework feels like it's built around the way adult learners specifically get stuck. Is any of it useful for kids or are they better off just playing a ton of games and not overthinking it at this age? Thomas. Well, it was a genuine joy to get this email. First off, congratulations on

1:06getting the kids involved. I don't have kids myself, but from what I've heard from members and students exploring the game with kids is extremely rewarding. So lots to look forward to there. I don't focus my work on kids because that's sort of historically where the bulk of chess knowledge and information has been targeted. So the chess improvement knowledge anyway has been targeted. And there's this gap of understanding and adult improvement. But a lot of the same things do apply. Actually, more than I would have thought much to my initial surprise, my techniques have found their way into high level chess boot camps for juniors. A whole room of 2,000 plus rated juniors working through some of the exercises from this podcast blew my mind when I heard about that. So it certainly applies. And I've also heard from other coaches, including Tiana Averkovich, who works with us here at Don't Move WFM. Blindfold exercises can be really useful, engaging

2:09distractible kids and kids with ADHD as well. So if that applies for you, that could be fun on that angle. The work applies. But you may find it less critical for them at this stage of their kind of chess engagement than it has been for you. Now, I don't have a lot on this. I haven't poured a ton of attention into working out how this stuff engaged with kids. It's just not a thing I've been focused on. But I did once here from the world champion 2019 world champion of the Pokemon trading card game. Friend of mine, he's lovely bloke. And he reached out at one point several years ago after running into my work in the chess world. Because it resonated with him, he works a lot in his coaching work in Pokemon. Surprisingly complex game that actually is really quite analogous to chess in the amount of working memory load it creates. And he

3:13reflected on his experience of coaching kids and coaching adults that the key difference between the two is that kids can juggle anything that they need. They can juggle all the information quite easily. But it's really difficult to get them to grasp the concepts. The concepts take a lot of effort and energy to get across. Adults have the opposite problem where the concepts we pick them up really quickly. But we're regularly struggling with working memory for getting details, getting things in the wrong order, all of this sort of stuff. So he identified that as the key difference between kids and adults. I definitely see a lot of working memory stuff in my work with adults. I haven't done a lot of one-on-one stuff with kids. So I don't have that experience back the other way. But a lot of this stuff applies across there. You may find that the working memory element of this once they've practiced it a little bit, they're probably in a spot where it's good enough

4:13for them to be able to juggle it because it may not be as critical for them at this stage. But if they're excited about it, learning to do things blindfolded is fun. They'll likely pick it up pretty quick as long as they have that fundamental chest understanding. And if they're really enjoying it, it's a heck of a skill to be able to impress people with at school and whatever, playing blindfolded games. Very cool. I think all of us would love to be able to do it. So that's really cool. The underlying psychology stuff will apply as well. So when they do make blunders when they do those sorts of things, you'll recognize from your experience my work, what that, what the working memory load may have been doing in that moment. So that'll apply across my take on it. It's basically experiment. See what happens. Top-level juniors are using this stuff. Again, much to my surprise. And it has proven useful with kids from other coaches that I've

5:14spoken with that have done that. The psychology certainly applies and understanding what's happening in the brain. So experiment. See what happens. Keep me posted how you go. Absolutely love to hear your experience with that and whether your nine and 11-year-olds start to become blindfolds experts, that would be so much fun. So hope that answers your question or at least gets you excited to get them involved with some blindfolded stuff. Yeah, really keen to see how that goes. So thanks for a great question. That is all from me today. Here's to the journey.