My wife knows nothing about chess and wanted to learn how to play, so I auditioned LearnChessOnline to see if she could grasp the basics without my being there to answer questions. The visual design, animations, rendering and various features in LearnChessOnline...5 STARS. Sadly, all this incredible work is wasted if LearnChessOnline fails to properly show a total beginner what's what.
I started with the Chess Piece tutorials in the THEORY section and selected the Pawn. One primary challenge in teaching anything requires the ability to forget everything known and start from there. Apparently, the developer makes numerous assumptions that the beginner "knows this already"...NOT!
1) The four-sided board appears to have four positions to sit at...adding the labels for YOU and OPPONENT would make it clear which sides are relavent.
2) Any opening tutorial on chess moves is best illustrated by first showing a fully populated board that mirrors the start of the game, and labels each piece for the beginner to learn their shape and name. Instead, LearnChessOnline assumes a player knows the starting positions for each piece and what they're called.
3) The tutorial displays a game-in-progress where, unbeknownst to a beginner, White's Queen has already been captured. So when the example showing a Pawn reaching the opponent's 8th row states it can now become a Queen, a beginner now knows — OK, every Pawn a player successfully moves to that back row can become a Queen!
The developer needs to either empty his knowledge bank and assume nothing...or find a number of TOTAL beginners, JUST listen to their questions WITHOUT supplying answers and observe their reactions and level of frustration.
