Yamie Chess simul with Jennifer Shahade

Recently at the Gen Con held in New York, 2-time USA chess champion and Yamie Chess creator Jennifer Shahade played a group of school children in a simul on Yamie Chess sets designed to bring more awareness to the math game. Children and parents had a great time approaching the game from a very creative perspective.

What is Yamie Chess?

Manufactured in the Michigan, USA, and designed for 5 to 12 year olds, the Yamie Chess® learning aid series focuses on nurturing children’s cognitive thinking and intellectual potential for mathematics, and is aligned to support the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’ Curriculum Focal Points in algebra, geometry, data analysis, measurement and number logic.

King Tigermore In Strawberry Fields - Yamie Chess Cartoon

In Yamie Chess, all the characters correspond to the classic chess pieces. Designed for math education, and built upon an integrated learning structure based on classic chess, Yamie Chess takes a fun, cognitive learning approach with cartoons to the ancient game, and uses visuo-spatial reasoning so that children explore the math (particularly algebra and geometry) underlying chess, through cartoon characters that have meaningful representations to the chessmen. 

Under the pieces the cartoon characters can be seen

The idea being to link each piece with a solid representation the children
can identify with

Children are guided to develop an intellectual framework for solving math and chess problems, while they interactively play, read, explore and color in the educational math comic for STEM learning (coloring pencils are included in the learning aid).

The books combine coloring, reading and other tools and techniques to teach chess and math

The children were thoroughly engaged by the process

In Yamie Chess, children are encouraged to constructively work as a team to find math solutions, engaging the coloring book that integrates with the classic chess layouts.

Of course it helps when a chess champion is there to inspire you...

...and give you some tips.

With kids having fun as well as learning at the same time, Yamie Chess strikes a good balance
for both parents and teachers in being educational and easing approaches to math learning.

Parents were able to see the children caught up in the fantasy of the presentation

Eight-year-old Connor Prikkel stuck it out the longest, refusing to give in...

... and was congratulated for coming close to salvaging a draw

Jennifer Shahade

Photos by Ryan Brown

Official site of Yamie Chess