Substantia (Jun 2024)
Teaching Chess History to Students in Natural Sciences: How to Do It and Why
Abstract
Lying halfway between science and art, chess presents an excellent model for instructing the new generation of scientists about the merits of artistic senses for the exhibitions of scientific creativity. With this goal in mind, a course for intermediate to advanced chess enthusiasts and aspiring scientists was designed and taught in a condensed form to a group of K-12 students as a prototype for a course that could be included to higher education curricula in the near future. As per the course design, each of the twenty weekly lectures in the semester elaborates a single chess game in a chronological order of their play, starting with the mid-19th century games played in a romantic style and ending with the recent computer engine games, where the romanticism of chess playing styles is being rediscovered, thus closing the circle of dominant chess playstyles throughout the history. This closed circle is interpreted in the context of the author’s lifelong effort to romanticize modern science. According to this effort, science, which has garnered over time increasingly unromantic traits and is associated today with managerial entrepreneurship, exploitative capitalism, cutthroat competition and fake elitism more than with quixotic ideals of arts, beauty and poetry, must be actively infused with lyricism and inspirational ideas and challenged for its retrograde reductionism. Each game in the course is explained in the context of the cultural zeitgeist of the decade in which it was played and also tied with famous experiments or general trends in natural sciences of the time. As the class proceeds along the 180-year long timeline encompassed by the course, it becomes increasingly obvious that developments in chess have closely reflected the trends in arts and natural sciences of the corresponding times, which is a parallel that is being drawn in this paper for the first time in the history of this board game. Because the major trends in chess and in natural sciences appear to have mirrored each other throughout the history, familiarizing oneself with the chess history up to the present times can be used as a means of evidencing the nascent and predicting the upcoming trends in sciences, and vice versa. Correspondingly, one major objective of the course has been to accustom students to recognize in chess games analogies for phenomena in distant domains, including those where their creativity in scientific research is being exhibited. The satisfaction of the students expressed in surveys distributed at the end of the condensed course attested to their finding in it a useful stop in their quest for the sources of inspiration for the further tracks of their scientific careers.
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