The main objective was to deliver a course to Italian and Swedish pupils that would have had as main subject the learning of chess and the correlation with coding and AI. With our project, to reach the main objective, we wanted 1. to develop an "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, Coding and Chess for Primary School" course. 2. to put teachers in the best possible position to effectively deliver the course through a tutor-assisted self-training initiative 3. to experiment with the course in four fifth-grade classes, three in Italy and two in Sweden. 4. to conduct an initial rough evaluation of the impact of the course itself. 5. to imagine and project a moment of dissemination and presentation of the results, both in Italy and in Sweden, in order to engage parents and teachers and collect the final results of the pilot experiment with chess, AI and Coding.
We were motivated by the belief that our project has a really innovative educational approach, based on gaming, fully in line with the trends strongly recommended for educational development by the EU and other high-level world agencies. We believed and still believe that the learning objectives of all three strands of the course - AI, Coding and Chess - are transversally and jointly of absolute importance and relevance to STEM disciplines and the STEAM approach methodology. In particular, the development (through and thanks to the relation between AI, Chess and Coding) of key competences such as critical thinking, strategic thinking, problem-solving skills, sensitivity to the ethical risks associated with AI, the ability to embrace fair-play within a well-regulated competitive environment, time management, mathematical logic, the ability to concentrate, memory training , the habit of considering the consequences of one's 'moves' before making them, ability in foresight and planning, are all skills essential for matching the challenges of today's digital world and of future working contexts: To help children facing the new difficulties means to help them become better individuals in the future and to build a better society.