How best to introduce a young child to go?

[Boidhre]

My son wants to play go (he's 5) and is showing a fair degree of interest in it, i.e. volunteers to sit down and watch a dsaun lecture on KGS with me or a high dan game or whatever over playing a computer game. The thing is I don't have a notion how best to teach him. He likes playing games against me and does this knowing I'm not really trying to beat him yet but as he puts it "as I get better the games will get harder."

So I'm open to ideas on how best to do this given my own limited knowledge of the game. I was thinking of getting him his own (cheap) 9x9 set and encouraging him to do GoChild, which he said tonight he'd like to do but beyond that I don't know what to do. I know I learned chess through my uncles when I was only a little older than him and loved it and I'd like him to experience the same thing with go.

[speedchase]

Migeru taught a child a little younger than your son
http://senseis.xmp.net/?JonathanHelis

reading that might help, although I don't think you should follow his plan exactly. You should let him do what interests him, and don't force him to do anything that doesn't, but beyond that I don't really have much advice.

[Boidhre]

Thank you that's interesting. Currently after about 4 games I get lectures on: staying connected, making two eyes, what being reduced to one liberty means from him and I see the beginnings of understanding about what territory is and isn't. Currently he focuses on staying alive through solid connections first and territory second. I'm trying to show him this doesn't work by taking lots of territory while he's busy connecting stones. When he's in territory mode he plays very defensively. That said, he's aggressive when he thinks he sees a weakness and is happy to let a stone dead but uncaptured and capture it if circumstances change and recognises atari. So overall I'm very happy with his progress.

But yes, the key is, he does this if he wants to do it not because I want him to.

[jts]

It's not clear to me that you should try to teach him. He understands the rules of the game and the goal, right? So play games with him. If you have supportive friends at your club or online, have them play with him. You might want to dispense a time-tested proverb once in a while, like "the first line is the line of death." Soon he'll be as good a a regular beginner and you can just make him an account on KGS.

As time goes on, if he gets to be the kind who likes to do puzzles on car trips, you can teach him how to do tsumego; if he turns into a bookworm, you can go through some go books together; if he starts getting really good, you can pay for lessons.

Think of learning Go as like learning a language. You aren't going to develop a lesson plan to teach your child English (if that's your native language); he's going to be fluent just by virtue of growing up casually practicing the language a great deal. As a child he will, of course, speak it in a childish way, and as a young adult he'll get a bit of specific instruction in how to speak, read, and write from professional language teachers, but trying to drill him in grammar and giving him vocabulary lists, the way you would with an adult who was learning English for the first time, would be counter-productive.

[badukJr]

Send him to Korea

[lobotommy]

Doing tsumego as a standalone puzzles will be best way to start, then atari-go.

[Boidhre]

It's not clear to me that you should try to teach him. He understands the rules of the game and the goal, right? So play games with him. If you have supportive friends at your club or online, have them play with him. You might want to dispense a time-tested proverb once in a while, like "the first line is the line of death." Soon he'll be as good a a regular beginner and you can just make him an account on KGS.

As time goes on, if he gets to be the kind who likes to do puzzles on car trips, you can teach him how to do tsumego; if he turns into a bookworm, you can go through some go books together; if he starts getting really good, you can pay for lessons.

Think of learning Go as like learning a language. You aren't going to develop a lesson plan to teach your child English (if that's your native language); he's going to be fluent just by virtue of growing up casually practicing the language a great deal. As a child he will, of course, speak it in a childish way, and as a young adult he'll get a bit of specific instruction in how to speak, read, and write from professional language teachers, but trying to drill him in grammar and giving him vocabulary lists, the way you would with an adult who was learning English for the first time, would be counter-productive.

Oh, I just want him to understand the true basics jts, I'm not planning on teaching him how to play per se. With chess I never got "lessons" off my uncles, they weren't any good at chess, but I learned the basic rules and played a lot of games which developed my interest in it and when I got older I started reading books on the game and getting knowledge that way, which is what I want to do with my son. I don't plan on teaching him higher concepts than just the rules since I don't understand them. But I figure it can't hurt teaching him how to recognise atari and understand what territory is and isn't. I have supportive friends at the club, a dan level player and two sdks say they'll happily play games with him, I just want to get him to the point where this will be useful to him.

When I say introduce in the title of this thread I truly mean introduce the most basic concepts, not teach him to be a good player.

[Boidhre]

Doing tsumego as a standalone puzzles will be best way to start, then atari-go.

I worry about atari-go and his age because I don't want him to think it's a game about capturing primarily. He's young enough that if he gets that idea into his head that it might be quite hard to break the habit of constantly trying to capture opposing stones.

[Insane]

Doing tsumego as a standalone puzzles will be best way to start, then atari-go.

I worry about atari-go and his age because I don't want him to think it's a game about capturing primarily. He's young enough that if he gets that idea into his head that it might be quite hard to break the habit of constantly trying to capture opposing stones.

That's a phase he is likely to go through anyhow.

[Boidhre]

Doing tsumego as a standalone puzzles will be best way to start, then atari-go.

I worry about atari-go and his age because I don't want him to think it's a game about capturing primarily. He's young enough that if he gets that idea into his head that it might be quite hard to break the habit of constantly trying to capture opposing stones.

That's a phase he is likely to go through anyhow.

True enough.

[jts]

Ah okay, well we're in agreement there. Here I think you can't go wrong with vocabulary and proverbs. I don't think that the guy who ran my preschool was that good at chess either, but he dropped things like "a rook on an open file is liquid gold" which have stuck with me my whole life.

If he's having trouble grasping the point of the game, you might go with stone scoring and tell him the point of the game is to get more stones on the board than the opponent. That will help him understand both territory and why you want to capture pretty quickly.

[Boidhre]

Ah okay, well we're in agreement there. Here I think you can't go wrong with vocabulary and proverbs. I don't think that the guy who ran my preschool was that good at chess either, but he dropped things like "a rook on an open file is liquid gold" which have stuck with me my whole life.

If he's having trouble grasping the point of the game, you might go with stone scoring and tell him the point of the game is to get more stones on the board than the opponent. That will help him understand both territory and why you want to capture pretty quickly.

That's interesting, proverbs might be useful to him at this point.

There's a version of go where the weaker player has 9 stones and the stronger player's job is to make a living group and they can't do a 3,3 invasion. I think it could be interesting for him.

[jts]

Arbitrarily disallowing the 3-3seems silly... Why not just make it 13 stones? Or 17?

[Boidhre]

Arbitrarily disallowing the 3-3seems silly... Why not just make it 13 stones? Or 17?

Eh, it was explained to me by a German player as a way to teach both players about making and/or preventing living groups, 3,3 invasions make it too easy for white.

*shrugs*

[EiggHead]

Thanks for the links and ideas. One of my 5 yr old twin girls is very interested in Go. I've had her doing the opening set of of problem on GoChild. She loves the it and has a good grasp of liberties and groups now.

Working up to playing with my board and stones but she gets a little wild sometimes and the stones get scattered