Chess Diagrams

In the last few months, my interest in Chess has been rekindled in large part due to http://en.chessbase.com/ and the associated online Fritz Chess Program. However, only premium users of ChessBase can make use of the feature that allows the setting up of positions, important when following through an analysis provided in a chess book. For example, I have a book called 101 Chess Endgame Tips by Steve Giddins. Here is a typical position in which White must try to draw the game and not lose it.

I could not see how to set up the position in either the chess program that comes with macOS or Stockfish that I had downloaded. So I downloaded a program called ChessX, an open source program that I found at sourceforge and found that I was able to set the position easily and play it through as outlined in the book. This is a very useful feature. 

The position above leads with proper play to White having the opposition against the Black King and therefore securing a draw. The proper play is: 

1. Kg3!! Kc2 2. Kf2! d2 3. Kf1! Kd1 4. Kf2 Kd2 5. Kf1 Kd3 6. Ke1 Kc4 7. Kd2 Kb5 8. Kc3 Kxb6 9. Kb4 and White has the opposition and draws. Ultimately, the position will end up as shown below where White must be careful to retreat to b1 where the opposition can be maintained whether Black chooses to move the King to a3 or b3.

Creating Online Courses and Classes

moodlecloud offers a free service along with paid plans

Despite my retirement from active teaching, I remain interested in education and am engaged in intermittent mathematics tutoring. I'm always on the lookout for ways to extend the tutoring session beyond the hour or so that I spend face-to-face with my student. To this end, I've made use of moodlecloud that provides a free service as well as paid options. Having so far only one student at any given time, I've found that the free service is quite adequate. Even though only 250 MB of storage is available, I've only used a small fraction.

The free service is adequate for those with a small number of students

Of course, it means that you can't upload large video files but you can link to them and that's enough. The free option is an excellent choice for people who work with only a small number of students.

When I was teaching full-time, I used the school-based Moodle installation most of the time but I did dabble with Edmodo and I still have an account. I recently archived my old courses and even posted to the Mathematics Forum. I may begin to experiment with it again. The site has an app that enables access via smartphone or tablet, so that's useful.

My Edmodo profile

I've also been experimenting with a site called Versal, that amongst other things offers an excellent tool for rendering mathematical expressions.

An example of the rendering of mathematical expressions

Of course, there's a hundreds of similar sites out there but these are three that I am using or have used, and they are all free. While writing this I was reminded of an excellent educational blog that I used to reference but haven't done so since leaving teaching. Here is the link. 

This site offers excellent reviews of educational resources