The Joy of Rediscovering Chess: The Perspectives of Dialogic Thinking in Chess

Chess is a zero-sum game with no uncertainty for any players, as there is no hidden information. The turn-based nature of the game introduces the gaming opportunity as profound in the characteristic of the player's style. Chess players realise and internalise such a body of knowledge, evaluations and further refine the learning from stimulating dialogues that nurture the progressive thinking from shared experience in gaming. Whilst, professional and experts in chess at the highest level have these traits, children and amateurs take a more random approach and enjoy the discoveries in Chess. In this paper, we explore the immersive social space of a playing environment and quantify Individual learning experiences and realise the Chess Board as an Interface to the opponent (who Constraints the Thinking). Further, the gaming opportunity with chess is then reduced to discovering the opponent in the context of effectively engaging in a progressive dialogue (from constrained to the regulated environment). In this formulation, we bring four different accounts of a facilitator's experience to bring an understanding of the journeys of children and young people learning chess. We outline the contrasting ideas and observation from (a) Social Inclusion Perspective with working with children with ADHD in Spain (b) Gender-based Dialogues - understanding female participation in Chess (c) Children's communication in highly Informal, teacherless, teaching less and Self-organised Learning Environment in Wales (d) Reflections from formal Chess-in-school programme in Gibraltar. With various attempts to engage chess in schools and communities, we could now design and nurture dialogic thinking in the context of game-based learning to re-imagine perspectives on how effortlessly (a) Experience is delivered to an audience of a universal appeal (b) Derive useful lessons learned to bring measurable and evidence-based outcomes through Game-based Learning.