Author: Nada Sharif
You can probably picture a chessboard right now, the alternating squares, the cool weight of a knight in your hand. Do you feel the temptation to attack too soon? Do you see patterns or only pieces? Are you planning one move, or five?
In its initial display, chess served not as a source of amusement, but as a means of preparation: a simplified representation of battle and coordination. During the 600s to 700s CE, chaturanga, a strategic war game from northwestern India, was thriving, characterized by a single leader’s unique abilities as a piece. It then made its way through Persia as Shatranj, and with the expansion of the Arab world into North Africa and Iberia, it reached Europe by the 10th century.
Take a moment and try to state the design problem chess solved for medieval players. It was more than just an entertaining board game. The challenge involved constructing a regulated environment in which leaders could assess risk, manage scarce resources, and strive for a decisive victory, the dismantling of the rival’s core strength, while adhering to strict guidelines and operating with partial knowledge.
Europe responded to that challenge by transforming the system entirely. In the late 1400s, two significant changes in rules revolutionized the game: the counsellor evolving into the powerful queen we know today, and the bishop acquiring the ability to move diagonally across long distances. This shifted it from a slow, attritional style to a fast-paced contest of strategy and foresight. Checkmates became attainable, and tactics aligned with swiftness.
From that point, chess evolved into a worldwide, standards-based competition. The first World Chess Championship was held in 1886, featuring the match between Steinitz and Zukertort, marking the formal recognition of a title that players had pursued for many years. In 1924, national federations established FIDE, the International Chess Federation, with the aim of standardizing rules, events, and rankings. During the late 20th century, the Elo rating system provided players with a clear, data-driven method to assess their advancement.
Advancement in technology has forced chess to new heights. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue achieved a historic victory by defeating world chess champion Garry Kasparov, showcasing the power of high-speed exhaustive search combined with immense computational capacity. Two decades later, AlphaZero revolutionized the field by mastering chess solely through self-play, developing innovative strategies and understanding the game at a human-like level. This progression highlights technological advancements, from raw computational strength to sophisticated, autonomous learning systems.
Why chess is a laboratory for critical thinking?
Chess transcends metaphor. It embodies thought in a tangible form, it is thinking made visible. Every action demands the same mental processes we strive to develop at Thinking Oasis.
Let’s break down the Critical Thinking processes of a chess game:
· Defining the Problem: “What is this position about?” Is the key problem king safety, pawn structure, or piece activity? Players learn to name the problem accurately before acting.
· Decomposition: Players break a complex situation into parts: threats, candidate moves, forcing lines, then recombine them into a plan.
· Hypothesis & test: A chess player questions “If I push this pawn, can Black create counterplay on the c-file?”. Lines are propositions serving as theories; computation acts as swift trials; assessment relies on data-driven conclusions.
· Metacognition. After the game: What assumption failed? Which bias (over-attacking, impulsivity, fear of ghosts) crept in? Reflection turns experience into skill. Thinking about thinking becomes a habit of mind, where players reflect on the whole process and learn from mistakes.
· Transferable habits. Planning under constraints, weighing trade-offs, and committing to decisions with incomplete information—all are the daily bread of real-world problem-solving.
What does research say?
A comprehensive research reveals that chess instruction offers short-term, modest advantages for math performance and general cognitive skills, particularly when students engage in approximately 25–30 hours of organised learning. At the same time, thorough research indicates that the benefits diminish when compared with similarly engaging active control activities, suggesting that the unique advantage may hinge on the methods of teaching chess (incorporating explicit reasoning strategies) rather than chess itself. In summary: chess serves as an excellent environment for fostering critical thinking; to achieve academic progress, the teaching must clearly articulate and reinforce those thinking skills.
Our approach at Thinking Oasis
We encourage chess and other strategy games, not as trophies or trivia, but as thinking gyms. But how?
1. Structured play, not just play: Our sessions are structured around a cycle of thought: Observe → Identify → Strategize → Test → Assess.
2. Thought-provoking prompts. Reflecting this to Socratic discussions on ethical dilemmas for example (Check Socrati), learners dissect a complicated scenario into components, even digging into meaning of terms used in the scenario, un-layering possibilities, potential actions, decisive sequences, before merging them back to their ethical decision .The Dilemmas proposed are designed to provoke questioning: “What was your initial judgment? What proof backed it up? What option did you decide against, and what was the reasoning behind that choice?”.
3. Inference toolkit. Students collect and rehearse general strategies through building knowledge from scratch, learn what works and what doesn’t, and decide when not to apply and when to employ. In each learning curve, our programs drive learners to build their own experiments, testing theories, formulating knowledge that they have assessed and tested.
4. Intentional challenges: Puzzles and games that requires thinking skills focus on specific skills to enhance thinking patterns without overwhelming the learners.
5. Reflect & transfer. Every session ends with a short reflection connecting board decisions to real-world choices, prioritizing tasks, negotiating constraints, revising plans.
The result is the habit of seeing clearly, reasoning step-by-step, and deciding with purpose, the same backbone of inquiry we use in our programs across Jordan and Qatar.
Strategy games evolve; the core idea endures
Chess matured from local variants to a global ecosystem: standard rules, transparent ratings, federated events, and today, engines and learning platforms that let any student analyze like a grandmaster. The pieces have changed; the tools have changed, but the core remains: a safe, structured arena to practice better thinking. Same for the programs we offer, whether its STEM-based learning or Philosophical dialogues, the core is developing critical thinking skills, the process of thinking about our thinking.
Resources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica – History of Chess. Encyclopedia Britannica
- Britannica – Chess overview. Encyclopedia Britannica
- First World Chess Championship (1886). Historical background and match details. Wikipedia
- FIDE (International Chess Federation). Founding (1924), governance, and scope. FIDE
- Elo Ratings – Adoption by federations. Historical note on USCF (1960) and FIDE (1970). ChessBase
- IBM Deep Blue. Technical capabilities and 1997 victory over Kasparov. IBM
- DeepMind AlphaZero. Self-play learning and breakthroughs in game strategy. Google DeepMind
- Frontiers in Psychology (Sala, Foley & Gobet, 2017). Meta-analytic view of chess instruction’s cognitive/academic effects and design recommendations. Frontiers
chess and critical thinking | history of chess | chess strategy and logic | learning through chess | problem-solving skills | chess and education | strategic thinking | Thinking Oasis programs | chess and technology | developing reasoning skills
