Promoting an Accessible Evidence-based Debate: The Impact of Kut.cards on Pacific Forensics
Tags: python, debate, speechanddebate, accessible
Published: 2022-10-26 03:06:03

Forensics (competitive speech and debate) plays a unique role in education. Students that participate in forensics gain skills in research, critical thinking, and public speaking (Bartanen and Littlefield, 2015). With all of these advantages it is hard to believe the growing narrative predicting the collapse of debate (Hlavacik et al, 2016).  In my time coaching and competing in competitive debate at both the 4-year and community college levels I’ve also noticed this decreasing interest.  I started my own forensic journey as a community college competitor in 2014, I walked on the team know very little about the activity. I started learning about all the different forms of debate my program offered. I ended up falling in love with Lincoln Douglas debate. The original Lincoln Douglas debate was between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. There was a series of seven debates between the two, each debate lasting hours and even days.  Though the competitive college format of Lincoln Douglas (LD) adopted the name, there is very little that still connects the two. LD debate has turned into a high-speed research heavy activity where each round lasts around 45 mins. Competitors are asked to create evidence cards based on the research they have read in order to build a case to defend and/or refute. LD debate focusses on a singular topic for the course of one academic year. This gives students the ability to become experts on the topic leading to a more informed and educational debate round.  That being said, LD has a significant research burden. I have come to believe that this research burden has contributed to the lack interest and retention of LD debaters.

I’ve come to notice that LD debate has a significantly hard time keeping new members. Novice debaters (new debaters) come into the activity with interest but once they are faced with the significant amount of research need to compete many quit the activity. Some schools have tried to mitigate this loss of students, by providing students with research packs and in some case hiring staff members who are in charge of doing that research for the students. But this solution is not available to smaller schools that do not have the funds or the available teachers to aid students in research and evidence creation. This has created a forensic environment where the most funded schools are the ones that can compete at the highest level. This reality is reflective of the LD national tournament, where the last ten champions have come from schools that can afford to hire graduate assistants and other teaching staff to guide their students and carry the research burden. I lived this reality when I competed in LD debate, and when I later became a coach, I wanted to create a tool that could help new students overcome the research learning curve.  Thus, I spent the summer developing a website called Kut.cards. This website would allow students to simply submit an article link. The website would then provide the user with a formatted evidence card based on the article that was submitted. I used a python package called NLTK to read articles and determine what argument was being made in the article, it would then bold the parts of the card that the user would read in a debate round.  I wanted to make sure that this tool would be able to bridge the gap between small and big schools. I published the website for use by the University of the Pacific speech and debate team. I wanted to allow these students which I was working with to use the tool so I could see the impact this tool could have on their debate performance. I allowed the team to use the tool for a year before I interview them to see the impact the tool had had on their lives. 

In this paper I will discuss the impact Kut.cards has had on the Pacific debate team, the potential harms and benefits of publishing this tool, and the stigma that has come from debate tools of the past. 

**Kut.cards**

Kut.cards was created to help students overcome the learning curve of evidence-based debate. Evidence based debate formats such as LD debate have a steep learning curve. Novice debaters are asked to not only learn the ins and outs of evidence-based debate, but they are also asked to research and create evidence cards, a skill that even experienced debaters can struggle with. Kut.cards lesson this learning cure by aiding students in the processing of evidence. Kut.cards formats debate cards as while as bolds and highlights the most relevant arguments within the cards. This tool helps to cut down the time and effort needed to-do effective research. This recovered time can then be better used teaching students the skills need to debate at a higher level. 

**Impact**

Kut.cards has had a limited uptime but has shown to have a positive effect.  Kut.cards was used at the University of the Pacific over the 2021-2022 debate season. In this time Kut.cards was used to write two full length debate affirmative cases and two negative debate cases. Kut.cards also found a use at debate tournaments where students needed to find evidence between rounds. Students were able to use their short time between round to find and cut evidence that would have normally taken them hours.  As a debate coach, I was able to use this extra time to coach my students between rounds. There is no way to fully equate our team’s success to the use of this tool, but I can confidently say that it had a positive effect. That being said there were some negative impacts that I believe are important to discuss.
 
Students who used Kut.cards had a hard time trusting the quality of the evidence that was being provided. This was more prominent among students who already had debate experience. Those who were new to the activity had the opposite effect. These students put too much confidence in the application. This confidence resulted in students failing to check evidence before reading it in competition. Notably during the first month of use Kut.cards had a bug in its code that would cause evidence to have incorrect dates. This was a problem that could have been easily fixed but students failed to check the evidence. Resulting in lost rounds due to miss dated evidence. 

**Coding Method**

I used python and flask to create Kut.cards. Python is an easy to learn high level programing language. I decide to use the flask framework because of its relatively dynamic feature set. I decide it was best to create a website because it would allow students to access this tool from any device with a web browser. There were a few problems that needed to be tackled, such as finding a way to teach my website to understand debate arguments and common debate evidence formatting.  

I used the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) to tokenize letters into words and sentences that later categorized and ranked for significant in the text. To pull text from online articles I used the newspaper2k python package. This package provided tools to pull the full text from an article and the citations. After gathering the article text and isolating the argument with the text I then used a python package called mailmerge to format the evidence card into an easy-to-use Docx file. 

**Discussion**

**Theoretical implications**

There are many implications that can come from this type of debate tool becoming published. First this type of tool has the potential to increase the accessibility of debate. Second, this type of debate tool also has the potential to hinder the core experience of debate and limit the research skills that come from these debate formats.  I believe that the benefit of increase debate accessibility can overcome the potential negative impacts. Debate has always been about increasing education and developing critical thinking skills. Making debate more accessible would allow for more students from a larger range of schools to actively participate within the activity.  This increase accessibility would lead to a more diverse and inclusive debate space. Though there is a risk that some research skills would be lost, I believe that this tool has its limitation and students would still be required to review the Kut.card evidence, students would also have to find the articles that they would like to cut. This would still allow for some aspect of research to be thought to debaters. 

**Conclusion**

Though Kut.cards has a limited uptime I have found that it has had a positive effect on the University of the Pacific. It was used throughout the 2021-2021 debate seasons and has helped the Pacific student further their education, and competitive debate goals. I found that not only did this help students research, but it also helped reduce the time commitment that comes with competitive evidence debate.  There has always been a stigma surrounding computers in debate. The forensic community quickly adopted online debate tools during the 2020-2021 season. In this season’s the forensic community was able to overcome the stigma and fear surrounding computer-based debate. Now that the door as been open I think it is time to computers in a beneficial way, a way that would bridge the gap between large and small schools. Not only would this increase the number of debaters within the debate community, but it would also help to create a more equitable and diverse debate space by fostering more diverse voices throughout all schools. I have decided that I will release this tool to the public. I will monitor its use for future studies surrounding the impact Kut.cards and tools like it on the debate community.