Jonathan Helis (b. 2002 February 24) is my girlfriend's son. I am starting to teach him Go, and he's doing much better than I expected, given his age. I will be logging the progress of this experiment here. Comments are welcome. --- Migeru
2004 October 17 --- Months ago I put Johathan in front of my goban for the first time, and all he would do was dump the stones on the board. About 10 days ago I tried again on the 13x13 side of the goban, and he understood that he was meant to use the black stones only, and that we were meant to take turns placing a stone on the board. Since then we have "played a game" each day (sometimes twice, in the morning and evening). He gets very excited when I bring out the goban, and he even asks me to bring it out sometimes. I set it up, and we play until he gets distracted or the board gets too cluttered, and then we pick up. Sometimes he declares the game to be over "early" by saying "S'acabo".
The first day Jonathan would place the stones in the squares, not on the intersections, and I corrected him. But the second day he already played on the intersections on his own. Since then, he has learnt to play the first few moves on the star points and not to play on the edge of the board. When our groups meet near the edge, he will sometimes descend to the edge. I did not insist that he play that way: Jonathan is learning entirely by imitation, and he seems to be developing a rudimentary understanding of what a healthy group looks like by imitating the shapes I make in my fuseki.
I usually play on the hoshi, and then play kakari, shoulder hits or san-san to envelop his group of stones. I consciously avoid captures, because I am not sure I could explain to him what a capture is. Jonathan understands a lot, but he does not talk much (apparently boys are slower to speak than girls, and he's confused by my Spanish, his mother's Czech and the fact that we live in an English-speaking environment). Maybe I should just try to capture to see if he gets the idea, but he might get upset and spoil the entire experiment, and I am a bit wary of his reaction if I introduce the possibility of removing stones from the board. I wouldn't mind waiting for a few months to introduce captures into the game, especially until I am able to have some sort of conversation with him.
2004 October 24 --- As far as the language issue goes, my point really was that go captures would, by far, be the most abstract concept that Jonathan would have ever encountered. He uses simple verb-noun pairs, but everything he can communicate about is very concrete, almost physiological (although he recently discovered "astronomy": sky, sun, moon and "ztarz").
Johathan's enthusiasm for the game is still high: he threw a tantrum on Wednesday because I had to go to work early and didn't have time to play with him after breakfast. I, on the other hand, have had to moderate the enthusiasm that motivated me to create this page, as Jonathan seems to have less patience with the game now than he used to. He'll usually declare the game over after move 6! Today I managed to extract 14-moves from him by not allowing him to pick up the stones. Here is the game as I remember it (we play on the 13x13 side of my goban, which has only 5 star points):