This experiment started as my simple idea: "Does playing chess before math improve math?"
Sometimes my brain feels noisy when I try to do math. But when I play chess, something changes. My mind feels calm, and I can think more clearly. So I started to wonder: "What would happen if I played chess before doing math?"
Then the experiment started once I had everything. It even led to this site!
Does chess help math and autism?
If I play chess before doing math, then it will help time, accuracy, and focus in logic puzzles. I thought this because chess would put me in a better mood and is my special interest.
I started by gathering a pencil, Apple stopwatch, blue folder with my data collection template, logic puzzle workbook, and chess.com. I changed if I did chess before or no chess before. I intentionally kept the data collection I was using the same, and the type of math I was doing. I was always doing logic puzzles. In my data collection, I measured focus (1-5 scale, where 1 means sleepy brain and 5 means full energy), accuracy (number of questions I got right), and time (how long it took in minutes).
I did 6 trials over about 1.5 months. Each trial lasted between about 5 minutes and up to a couple of hours.
What I Found
My data showed that chess improved accuracy and time. Focus in math was not improved by chess. In three of the trials, I played chess before logic puzzles. In the other three trials, I did not play chess before math.
I found that when I played chess before, for example in trial two, my time was 8.10 minutes with chess compared with 8.14 minutes without chess in trial one. In trial 5 without playing chess, the math worksheet took 14 minutes, compared with trial 4 which took me 2.14 minutes to do with chess.
For focus, trial three with chess and trial five without chess were both 5/5. This is an example of chess having no effect on focus for solving math problems. When I played chess for too long, accuracy was not improved. This was very unexpected!
My Conclusion
My hypothesis was correct and incorrect. It turns out that only time and accuracy were improved. I think I should have put 5/5 for focus all of the six trials. I did not because I thought just a little noise was going to be a distraction but it was not.
I did not do each trial in the same place or time of day so this could have affected my results. Next, I need to do 2 more trials to feel more confident with my results.
My Data
Red means no chess before. Green means chess before. These are my hand-drawn graphs showing my results.
- Keith