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

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Invite students to share their answers with the class. This debate game can be repeated with any other topic as well. 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 Game In a circle, have one person state an argumentative claim in a complete sentence with reasoning. For instance, “Schools should increase funding for mental health services because dealing with stress helps students do better academically.” The next person in the circle then restates the claim, but with fewer words. The next person builds on the new version but with more powerful words (i.e. “Schools are responsible for students’ mental health to prevent academic failure.”) Repeat until the claim is concise with powerful words and then have someone start a new claim. That’s a lot of thought given to a simple statement. In any of those cases, we would’ve kind of played the game, but haven’t accomplished anything. So, what should we say instead? How about something we truly believe in. Something we’ve already given a lot of thought to. The good news is that this helps us to choose our words more carefully, too. We want our suggestion to be as well-received as possible, so being able to tailor our wording accordingly will have a positive impact on our audience.

By yourself, you will have to talk to yourself (which is still okay!), stating a claim and then whittling it down to fewer words with a more powerful impact. You can also do this in writing, but it is more difficult out loud, so it’s worth doing (even if it is a little weird). 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 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. Tell students to walk to the corner that best explains about how they feel about the topic. Give the groups a few minutes to talk about the topic and write down the reasons for their decision.This is a hard activity by yourself, but you can put statements on index cards and draw them out of a hat. Each student should then be given a copy of the PowerPoint Template which they can use to frame their research:

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 first finalist should explain why the person to their left does NOT deserve to stay in the balloon. The person criticised in this way should be given a chance to respond before they in turn criticise the person to their left. The person at the end of the line should criticise the person who started the discussion. If they had homework time before the lesson, they will hopefully have made a mask ready for the debate.

The ‘Two hands / One hand” voting system works well here: in this format, students raise two hands (=two votes against) their least favourite character, and one hand against the second least-favoured. This makes for a slightly more sophisticated voting outcome. There are a range of different games that can be used for different situations to build confidence and fluency, as well as develop students knowledge of debating language. Each of the activities in this resource can be adjusted to suit the needs of your students. Who were the last three people to survive in the balloon, and why were they considered so important? The audience then has to vote who should be thrown out. It is important that they don’t vote for who should stay in – because there is too much of a tendency for students to vote in favour of the finalist whose team they belong to. 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.Students will learn to keep their cards for when they have a very important point to make so you can reward players with extra cards for making excellent points or asking important questions. Rather, he recommends the positive playful voice as a standard one. Smile while talking, be encouraging and keep it light. That leaves us with the calm soothing voice, which he dubs the late-night FM DJ voice. It’s a much slower, quite deep reassuring way of speaking. In that, it not only soothes and slows down the minds of our audience but also our own. So try it if your audience is rather nervous or if you are. In fact, you can test this right now by reading this sentence in an erratically aggressive tone first and then as a late-night FM DJ. 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).