Mindmade Debatable - A hilarious party game for people who love to argue

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Instead of a chessboard, each pair has a piece of paper in front of them, which we’ve prepped in advance. It’s upside down so nobody can see what’s on it yet. Each sheet features two propositions, one facing each debater. The more opposing the viewpoints are, the better. For example: Round 2 – Each proposal may be best at something, but this doesn’t yet allow us to choose which is best overall. This debate strategy centres on listening to the views of others and responding to them. It is a very good pre-writing debate strategy. Have students form small groups. Give each student an object (e.g. a pen, a pair of sunglasses, a phone charger). Within the small groups, students should convince others that they should ‘buy’ their object. When a student agrees with the statement, they should stand up and ‘cross the circle’, finding a new seat from one which has been vacated. The facilitator should also take a seat and the student left standing then begins the next round with a statement of their own.

Next, ask the student teams to change their positions and argue the opposing viewpoint. (Perhaps the group of observers might change places with one of the other groups.) Find a random news article from your favorite periodical -- this can be serious but can also easily be from a tabloid magazine. Skim the article and then summarize it out loud to someone in 1 minute without any preparation. The summary should be intriguing as well as clear and to the point. Note down the roles of the stakeholders on the index cards, one stakeholder per card. Be sure you have at least three index cards for each stakeholder role.

It’s easy to dismiss this debate game as child’s play. But it’s a great way to try out and practice some of the basics, especially if we’re struggling to speak in front of crowds. If that’s the case, we can even provide topics or complete statements for If I ruled the world…, so participants can truly focus on their delivery. If we’re no longer struggling with finding words and getting them out of our mouths, here are a few progressions we may want to try out. Inflections

If we were to completely nerd out, we could even record the game, get a transcript and analyse which rabbit holes debaters chose and where they could’ve taken a different route. We could then repeat the game to see how we improved. Since every issue can be broken down into subtopics and corresponding arguments, it can be a great brainstorming exercise to map out this territory. It’s a cruder, more applied method than systematic research; a method that makes us reconsider what we know about an issue and how much we’ve actually thought it through.Children are most likely to be well- aware about local issues and issues affecting their school. For an exciting debate project, discuss an issue that kids are already experiencing or offer them an alternative as to how things are going currently. Children can debate on the following topics:

By yourself, you can practice by listing as many impacts as you can following a statement, before getting ridiculous (or “popping the balloon”). Get students to make a mask to wear during the debate. See this post on the ClassTools blog for some ideas. In the first lesson, each student needs to choose (or will be allocated) a character relating to the topic of study (for example, eminent Victorians). After the presentations, the entire class can join in by asking questions of the individual stakeholders. When it ends, students decide which side of the debate — the Affirmative or Negative — presented the strongest case. Each student will give a 30-second explanation of why their character should be allowed to stay in the balloon, using a point and an explanation. After these arguments, the rest of the students should vote on who should be thrown out of the balloon. This can be repeated until only one person remains in the balloon.

The majority of our paper analyzes debate as a concept; the experiments above are quite preliminary. In the future we’d like to do more difficult visual experiments and eventually experiments in natural language. The judges should eventually be humans (or models trained from sparse human judgements) rather than ML models that metaphorically represent humans. The agents should eventually be powerful ML systems that do things humans can’t directly comprehend. It will also be important to test debates over value-laden questions where human biases play a role, testing if it’s possible to get aligned behavior from biased human judges. Round 2: Dish the Dirt – possible search terms for students to use when using the web to research negative points about the rival finalists!