My Start toward Better Chess Coaching Tools

When I first started taking chess lessons with a coach, I used lichess studies to share a board with my coach while we talked through positions on Skype. In each hour-long lesson, we would go over 5 or 6 positions in that week's topic. At first, this worked well since it allowed me to understand the thoughts of a much stronger player. As time went on, I realized I wanted more from my chess lessons.

I wanted to easily practice the key points like chess puzzles so they would stick.

I wanted to practice more than 5 to 6 positions each week.

I wanted to be able to work on my own, have my coach check my games and offer feedback.

On the other hand, I did love how rich chess explanations are when someone makes moves on the board, draws arrows, and explains their thoughts.

So how could I improve my coaching lessons?

After some thought and talking to chess coach friends, I decided to build my own chess coaching tools.

I started building a way for my coach to easily look through my own chess games, check my games and offer feedback.

I started building a way for coaches to easily set up chess homework, chess assignments, and chess quizzes.

I started building a way for coaches to record short bite-sized snippets of rich position analysis.

I started building a way for myself to use these snippets as puzzles with spaced repetitions.

See here as the start to allowing mini-lessons from one of my coaches. I am now getting hundreds of these from my coach to practice as puzzles.

This project is definitely still in the early stages of development so there's much more to be done, and many issues to fix. But I'm enthusiastic about establishing a better system for us to collaborate on chess positions, setting up our own little chess communities, and making the lives of both chess coaches and students more convenient.