Alexandra’s Blog

The In-Depth project is something that the TALONS program does every year. Each student picks a topic/skill that they want to learn about and pursue over the next five months. This learning is done in each student’s free time, and they report back on their progress every three weeks or so with the use of their blog posts. This year I picked chess as my In-Depth topic. I picked chess for three reasons: I’ve wanted to know how to play chess since I was little, I hope that in the future this skill will open doors and be the spark of new relationships, and it improves your cognitive skills, attention span, and memory capacity.

Over the next five months, I will learn the basics of the game: the rules, how the board is set up, how to move the pieces, how to capture pieces, and how to win the game. After learning the basics, I’ll be able to start playing the game. From there I will learn basic tactics, and simple endgames, always reinforcing my learning by playing as many games as possible. Once I get quite proficient at playing, I will memorize learn chess notation as this will open the door to a lot more resources for me. Finally, I will study basic openings and intermediate tactics. These are the big ideas I want to cover over the next five months. By the end of the five months, I want to have achieved a rating between 600 and 800. I will be playing chess on an online website called chess.com, which makes it easy to track your rating and your progress. A lot of my learning will also come from analyzing the games I play on my own and with my mentor.

For my final project, I will participate in a chess tournament. I will use everything that I learned over the five months to play to the best of my abilities. My goal is to win a few games in the tournament. After the tournament, I will look back at the games I played and analyze them. I’ll acknowledge the good things that I did and the bad things. This analysis will be part of my final presentation. My final presentation will be in the form of a website and demonstrate my journey. Additionally, at the end of my project, I will rewatch one of my favourite TV shows, Queen’s Gambit, which is centred around a girl who plays chess. I will specifically analyze the last game she plays in the series and write my thoughts about it.

I will be learning how to play chess with the use of many online resources, and my mentor. My mentor’s name is Igor. He is one of my parents’ long-time friends, and my family is very close with his family. Igor has a passion for chess and plays daily. His chess rating is above 2000, which is the rating of a national master. Igor lives near me, so I will be able to meet at his house to play chess. I think that he will be able to help me in my journey tremendously.

I will begin my learning and report back in a few weeks on my progress.