The majority of the day today was based on impact calculus, a major component of any debate round. In the morning, we analyzed impacts and their role in a debate round. A basic structure is made up of a claim, warrant, and an impact. The claim is just the argument stated (i.e Apples are sweet). The warrant is the reasoning that supports your claim (i.e apples have a very high sugar content). Finally, the impact is why the argument matters. The impact is, oftentimes, the most important aspect of an argument because if your argument doesn't have a good impact, then there is no reason for the judge to care about it.
After our discussion about impacts, we talked about impact calculus, the comparison between two impacts. When debaters are arguing against each other, they will often have to weigh their impacts against each other. That is, debaters have to explain to the judge why their impact is larger and more important than their opponents. Typically, we weigh impacts based on five main principles: magnitude, probability, time frame, scope, and reversibility.
Before we broke for lunch today, we all got together to sing happy birthday to our camper, Robin Pan, who is turning 14 today! Happy birthday Robin!
We ate lunch in the field house today because it was a bit hot outside and the field house was a large open, air-conditioned space where the kids could play sports, eat their lunch, and just hang out and talk.
After lunch, we came back inside and started out impact calculus exercise. Campers were assigned different impacts that they came up with themselves and had to engage in an impact calculus debate with others, trying to prove that their impact was larger than their opponents.
We ended the day with a fun presentation game, where campers were tasked with talking for a full 2 minutes, without saying any filler words, such as "like, um," or "uh". The role of this game is to improve efficiency and by the end, campers were coming up with many strategies to get through the full 2 minutes!