TEACHING 200 CHILDREN TO PLAY GO Francis Roads
francis@jfroads.demon.co.uk
On Thursday 20th May I taught 200 children to play Go. No, not all at once. Balgowan Primary School in Beckenham, SE London, wanted all their Year 5 and Year 6 pupils to learn Go, in preparation for selecting a team for the UK Go Challenge. That was six classes of 30+ children aged 911.
or more zero-liberty stones or groups, but that ’s the idea of capture Go, to teach the concept of capture. A minor problem with capture Go, is that the children don ’t always see the need to remove the captured group, even when they do spot it. Since one of them has now won the game anyway, they tend to just clear all the stones away and start again. This led to misunderstandings when I later introduced territory Go.
The driving force behind this initiative was Janet Bell, not a teacher at the school, but a governor and parent. “I used to see people playing Go at university, though I didn ’t get involved myself at the time, ” she said. I might have guessed that she was at Cambridge. She had persuaded the school to buy enough Payday Games 9x9 sets for a whole class to play at once. She had also stocked up on literature; the cartoon booklet, the BGA pamphlet, and the “Asia and the Game of Go ” leaflet produced by the EGCC. The latter went down very well with the class teachers.
Another thing we had to watch out for was children who had turned the board over and were trying to play 13x13 Go. Even at this level, you can suffer from “strong players use larger boards so if I use one I ’ll be stronger ” syndrome. Whatever the age group that you are teaching, it ’s good practice to keep explanations to the minimum. I guess that a good three quarters of my six 40 minute sessions were spent actually playing Go. But children don ’t have long attention spans, so I stopped them a couple of times for further talk. During these I gave a brief introduction to the suicide rule, but without mentioning what happens when an apparently suicidal move actually makes a capture; an illustration of why stones near the edge tend to be vulnerable; and an explanation of handicapping. For the latter I simply said that each time a player won three games in a row, the opponent was allowed one extra move at the start of the game.
Crossing London in the rush-hour, especially if carrying a demonstration board, is a pain. I had to leave at 7.30 to be sure of arriving at 9.30, for a 9.45 start. I ’d just about woken up by then, and was confronted by my first class of mixedability, mixed-attitude, 9 and 10 year olds. As a retired teacher, who has spent a lot of my career in primary schools, I know what you have to do to keep interest, but it ’s hard going. I taught capture Go in about five minutes; first to capture a stone wins the game. Then off they went into their first game.
This approach seemed to work. Maybe the children were left with only the haziest idea of the game that we play at our clubs, but they pretty well all seemed to remain on task and to be enjoying it.
Janet, the class teacher, and I patrolled about keeping people happy. The main problem was coming upon a board with one 12