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

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Set the scene: all these people are in a balloon, but it is leaking. To save themselves, they will have to throw someone overboard! In a circle or small group, one person makes an statement (i.e. “Traffic in the Bay Area is at an all-time high.). The next person adds on by saying, “which leads to…” and the next person adds on by saying, “which leads to…” Each result should be increasingly bigger and more impactful to “blow up the balloon”. 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. Get students to make a mask to wear during the debate. See this post on the ClassTools blog for some ideas. Because like any skill, the art of debate requires practice. Practice requires an understanding of the underlying structure and one way to explore those structures is through playful activities. The great thing about them is that we can fail without any negative consequences — other than to our ego. Here to crush and then rebuild our self-esteem are three underrated debate games that can teach us how to argue effectively. Table of Contents

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 presentations Time spent arguing is, oddly enough, almost never wasted. Christopher Hitchens, inventor of the Hitchslap

Give AI a Try!

How can we augment humans so that they can effectively supervise advanced AI systems? One way is to take advantage of the AI itself to help with the supervision, asking the AI (or a separate AI) to point out flaws in any proposed action. To achieve this, we reframe the learning problem as a game played between two agents, where the agents have an argument with each other and the human judges the exchange. Even if the agents have a more advanced understanding of the problem than the human, the human may be able to judge which agent has the better argument (similar to expert witnesses arguing to convince a jury). Round 2: Dish the Dirt – possible search terms for students to use when using the web to research negative points about the rival finalists! 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 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.

Various topics for students should be posed in the classroom. Decide on a topic based on the students’ age group and level of interest. For instance, in the elementary school, invite students to debate on statements such as, “It is important to eat from all the four food groups daily.” High school students might prefer a debate on “Should schools adopt a dress code?” Second, compared to the first two, Speed Debating is less public. Individuals talk to individuals, they can ‘hide’ in the crowd and the general noise the parallel debates create. So it lends itself to participants being able to practice what they say and how they say it. They could be encouraged to make one claim (see: If I ruled the world…) and give one explanation (see: The Why Game) before the other side responds. Debaters take turns making a single move each so to speak. It’s a bit like playing several rounds of fast chess.

Looking for something different

Let’s start by simplifying things. In his book Never Split the Difference, former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss distinguishes between three different voices: an assertive voice, a playful-upbeat one and a calm and soothing tone. To make things even easier, we can forget about the assertive tone because there’s hardly ever any use for it according to Voss. Students could produce a ‘Paper People’ project to connect the various characters discussed during the debate. Whatever the issue is for debate in your classroom, decide in advance or ask students to help you identify the stakeholders in the debate. 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.