Schools Area

Bridge as a classroom motivator which does not take away curriculum time.

Students will get through their maths work quickly in order to play bridge. The key to doing this successfully is to rigidly make it conditional upon finishing the assigned work satisfactorily and then allowing the students to play bridge. This can be done at the end of class or taking one class a week that is a poor teaching time such as the last lesson of the day. This worked well when it was tried in three of the schools in the Isle of Wight Bridge Project. The children had been through a Mini Bridge starter course for learning the background to bridge and also the handling of the cards - which is shown in a video clip. Then they were introduced to 'proper' bridge.

This is not new information, John Jones, a top County Bridge and Chess Player in Hampshire, England was a maths teacher at Fareham Grammar School in the 1970s. (A Grammar school was for children over 11 who passed an entrance exam) For 7 years he took the last maths class of the week for bridge. He never had to cancel it because the curriculum requirements for the week had not been satisfactorily met. It is perhaps easy to see that children would enjoy playing bridge in class-time, but not only did it improve the maths they were doing at the time, it also enhanced mental arithmetic, conditional thinking, specifically, logic in general, and demonstrated the need to co-operate with a bridge partner.