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

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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. Have someone discuss 2-3 arguments about any simple prompt (i.e. “Spring is better than summer.”). Listeners take notes using as few full, real words as possible -- the goal is to try use abbreviations, symbols, and codes to represent ideas.

When each group has a winner, you can have a further round in front of the class to find an overall winning object. 8) Balloon Debate Obviously, it doesn’t have to be the world. We can start small with a continent, a country, our company or school, department, or team. Sounds too easy? It is. As long as we’re all absolutely sure we can stand up straight in front of a group, introduce ourselves and take a clear position on an issue; regardless of what the crowd may reply let alone think of us. The great thing about those voices is that we’ll never have to think about how to say something again. As soon as we’ve found our personal interpretations of those two tones, it’s either playful or soothing. That’s it. Debate Game Progressions In sum, If I ruled the world… can be played as a mere uttering of meaningless words. If we prefer to use it to its full potential, on the other hand, we can make it a warm-up or an exercise to practice what we say and how we say it. It’s also great as a diagnostic tool to gauge how comfortable people are in their presentation. In any case, this activity lays the groundwork for debate game number two. 2. The Why GameGive students a statement and ask them to give all the reasons why they disagree with it. Make sure that the statements are absolute but difficult to disagree with. Speed Debating capitalises on people’s preference to just have a go at each other verbally. In my experience, the rules of engagement in a formalised debate are what puts many people off. In this debate game, pretty much the only rule is to engage. (Which of course we can do most effectively if we’ve mastered If I ruled the world… and the Why Game). But let’s be honest, there’s a reason why Hitchens is famous for the Hitchslap, not the Hitch-Rules-of-Engagement.

Balloon debates are a great way of promoting research and presentational skills, and invariably make for a very lively lesson! Lesson 1: Students research a character and prepare their presentationsThe 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. 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 First of all, Speed Debating is one of the less structured debate games, which in my experience makes it more engaging depending on the group. It’s great as a warm-up, for breaking the ice or to wrap things up in the end. There’s a bigger risk for participants to strawman an argument, but this will be offset once the tables have turned. From our public speaking competitions to our in-school workshops like Discover Your Voice , we know the importance of oracy in the classroom. If you’re teaching students debating, you probably need to find ways to engage them before diving in. Here’s a list of tried-and-tested debating games that our facilitators and mentors use in primary and secondary school classrooms to get students thinking. All the best debating games for students 1) If I Ruled the World In a role play debate, students scrutinize different points of view or perspectives related to an issue. For example, a debate about the question “Should students be required to wear uniforms at school?” might yield a range of opinions. Those might include views expressed by a student (or perhaps two students – one representing each side of the issue), a parent, a school principal, a police officer, a teacher, the owner of a clothing store, and others.