Overview

At academic institutions, both students and learners develop academic skills as well as their social lives. Once the balance between the two has been struck students tend to function more proficiently.  Extramural activities connect youth to a network of people and help them to interact with individuals who will have a positive effect on their development.  One of the extramural activities offered at the University of Pretoria is chess.  

Chess is a two-player strategy board game played on a chessboard, a checked game board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid.  It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in parks, clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.  Chess has always had an image problem, being seen as a game for brainiacs and people with already high IQs.  

So there has been a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation:  do smart people gravitate towards chess, or does playing chess make them smart?  At least one study has shown that moving those knights and rooks around can, in fact, raise a person's intelligence quotient. A study of 4,000 Venezuelan students produced significant rises in the IQ scores of both boys and girls after 4 months of chess instruction.