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Scrabble, the brain harmonizer
Should form part of school curriculum
By Rawle Welch
As I sat watching the blockbuster final of this year’s National Open Scrabble Tournament between new champion Abigail McDonald, who incidentally became the first female winner and the youngest to do so and three-time titlist Frederick Collins, a degree of anger engulfed my body.
Eventual champion Abigail McDonald (right) and Fred Collins battle during last weekend’s finale in the national championship.
The feeling of resentment occurred as I considered the support other sports such as Chess receives from the Ministry of Sport in comparison with the lack thereof for Scrabble.
So much has been done and rightly so for the development of Chess in schools, but comparatively little if any is given to the Guyana Association of Scrabble Players (GASP) to get the game off and running in the school system.
As someone who have been integrally involved in the sport from a media standpoint for a few years, during which time I’ve tried passionately to promote the game, this view of lack of support is not being offered second hand, but instead directly.
I’ve heard so many times in the past of impending collaboration between the Ministry and GASP, but to the best of my knowledge this partnership is yet to bear fruit.
The importance of providing the opportunity for students to participate in chess and scrabble in schools cannot be understated and with the ever increasing decline in literacy in the society, a more robust effort should be attempted to ensure that the two games form part of the education curriculum.
The benefits are enormous and a report out of Malaysia which was done a couple years ago stated, Scrabble has been receiving encouraging responses from the general public representing various sectors in the country.
It is no longer merely a game for kids or for fun; as wrongly viewed by many quarters; but it is now considered a game of wit, cunning and strategy. It has also become an international class game like chess. The report added that with proper guidance and support, Scrabble has a great potential to be developed equivalently to the world-class badminton and hockey (two of the more recognised sports in Malaysia).
In countries; where English is the mother-tongue; such as US, UK, Australia and many others in the European Continent, Scrabble has been part of the core activity serving as an aid to teaching English. Thailand has adopted similar concepts recently by making Scrabble as one of the aids for teaching English. This fact has been proven with 6000 Thai students being sent away every year to participate in Scrabble tournaments/championships at all levels (including international).
There have been many living proofs around the globe that Scrabble benefits both in Education per se and Personal Development of students including the harmonization of the left and right parts of the brain.
How to play Scrabble
Scrabble is a word game; you play with lettered tiles, and two blanks which can be used for anything. Each player has a rack and picks 7 tiles. Each player has a turn to play and the tiles are set on the board like a crossword puzzle. Each letter that you place on the board must connect with an existing letters to form words. Scrabble words can be as small as two letters and be as long as you can make of them. Of course you only have seven tiles in your rack, so your word for your turn would take you seven tiles (no more), but if added to an existing word, it would make it longer. For example, you may have the letters H E A V E N L in your rack and there is a y on the board already. You can connect those letters to Y to make HEAVENLY. Watch out though, every word on the board must makes sense or your opponent can challenge you and you would lose your turn and the score you just thought you made.
You can play actual words or you can bluff. As long as the opponent does not challenge, you get to keep that phony word score.
All scores are tallied by the letter value. For example a Z is worth 10 points but an E is worth one point. The strategy is to make as many high scoring words as you can. So positioning them on the board is a big strategy of the game.
On the boards there are double letter tiles and double word and triple word tiles. If you play Z on the double letter that Z is worth 20 points, but if you put your entire word on a double word tile the whole word is doubled, so if your word was zero, you would have 26 points for a double word, if Z was on a double letter in that double word that score now becomes 46 and so on.
You also get points for joining words together on the board.
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