Chess Software for Children

It's been four months since writing Connecting Children with Chess (February 2016):-

In my next post for the 'Chess in School' series, I'll look at chess software for children, in the same spirit as I did for Chess Curriculum (December 2015).

Although 'my next post' came and went many times, the topic has been on my mind ever since. The subject of the 'Connecting' post was:-

• Chessity 'Learn and improve your chess | Gaming your chess training'

At first glance the site doesn't appear to offer anything specific for children, so I kept looking. Two products -- both of them engines embedded into instructional material -- came up repeatedly. Here are the relevant Wikipedia links:-

• Chessmaster, specifically the Josh Waitzkin version: 'October 2007: The current version, Chessmaster XI, was released for PC (titled Chessmaster: Grandmaster Edition) [...] It includes numerous tutorials by IM Joshua Waitzkin for players of all skill levels.'
  
  
• Fritz (chess), 'Fritz and Chesster is a series of introductory chess programs based on the Fritz engine. Each program provides basic tutorials and games based on one aspect of chess, allowing children to learn the basic rules easily without overwhelming them with too many options at once.'

For more info, including more than 100 reviews each, here are the Amazon links:-

• Chessmaster: Grandmaster Edition: PC
• Learn to Play Chess with Fritz and Chesster

As with its parent site, Chess.com, the elephant in this space is:-

• ChessKid.com (same site as ChessKids.com)

Back to the software, those were older products than I was expecting to find, so I need to take time to look into them. I'll come back to the subject, hopefully sooner than four months from now.