If your children come home from school and announce that they played chess that day, don’t worry. They might have learned something anyway.

It might have been part of that day’s math lesson.

Jerry Nash, the scholastic director of the U.S. Chess Federation, told educators who gathered at Texas Woman’s University on Friday how chess could teach many math skills to young children.

DRC/Barron Ludlum

Paige Owens, 11, contemplates her next move at a workshop on using chess to teach math skills to children Friday at Texas Woman's University. William Root, who had just taught Paige how to play, watches.

“Will chess solve all the problems? No, but it is a tool that enables teachers to do more efficiently what they are required to do,” Nash told the group. “The math and the critical-thinking skills are inherent in the game.”

Nash said he began to see the benefits of chess when he worked as a college minister in Lake Charles, La.

Students with problems would come talk to him, he said, and they would want him to tell them how to make things better.

The problem, he determined, often centered on the students’ inability to think for themselves and make intelligent decisions.

However, he found students who could do those things when he taught chess at a school in St. Charles.

“My [college] students didn’t know how to think about their future; they didn’t know how to think about their past,” he said. “The fourth- and fifth- graders I was coaching in chess could out-think my college students.”

Such programs should appeal to business, he said, which needs good problem solvers.

Sixteen adults and four children attended the workshop.

While Nash discussed the benefits of chess in teaching geometry, planning, how to read a grid, critical thinking and other lessons, five children sat around a table in the back of the room.

Within one hour, 10-year-old William Root taught three others the game’s basic rules.

His “students” had never played before but were all doing well, he said afterward.

“One of my students, she was brilliant,” William said. “She could definitely play a chess game and play fairly well.”

His mother, Alexey W. Root, a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Dallas and the associate director of the university’s chess program, wrote a book on the subject.

Her book, Children and Chess: A Guide for Educators, explains how chess can be used as a teaching tool in the classroom, and gives sample lessons.

Root said she had organized a chess program at Evers Park Elementary School and a tournament for Denton’s middle schools.

Robert Jackson, a teacher at Seguin Elementary School in Grand Prairie, took an online class that Root taught, he said, and he uses chess in his classroom.

“Usually when I would teach them to read coordinates and grids, I’d go over it and over it and over it, and about half of them still wouldn’t get it,” he said. “The first time I taught them coordinates and grids with chess, all but one got it. I said ‘Yes!’”

MATTHEW ZABEL can be reached at 940-566-6884. His e-mail is mzabel@dentonrc.com.