You are in a hot air balloon that is losing height rapidly. It will soon crash into the side of a mountain because it is overweight. To prevent the certain death of everybody on board, only one person will be allowed to stay in the balloon!” Instead of a chessboard, each pair has a piece of paper in front of them, which we’ve prepped in advance. It’s upside down so nobody can see what’s on it yet. Each sheet features two propositions, one facing each debater. The more opposing the viewpoints are, the better. For example: Apart from knowing how to run the activities and what we can achieve with them, there’s one last point to consider. The eternal trade-off between content and delivery. Depending on the group and context, the mere goal of improving reasoning or communication skills may not capture the undivided attention of the whole group. We may need the right content or context as motivational drivers. In our example, the global ruler had a choice in the very beginning. Provide an explanation for the taste claim or the health one. In the end, the aspiring world leader vaguely went with both, which led down a rabbit hole of mental shortcuts from which there was no escape. So, one thing we can practice using this game is to make conscious choices in terms of our line of argumentation.

Next, ask the student teams to change their positions and argue the opposing viewpoint. (Perhaps the group of observers might change places with one of the other groups.)After the presentations, the entire class can join in by asking questions of the individual stakeholders. When it ends, students decide which side of the debate — the Affirmative or Negative — presented the strongest case. 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. At the end of their speech, invite questions from the audience. These can be answered directly, OR the student concerned can nominate a ‘researcher’ to make a note of these questions and start finding the answers to them. Assemble the students of Group 1 in a circle and sit on chairs facing outward, away from the circle. Arrange students in Group 2 into a circle of chairs around Group 1, facing the students in Group 1. Groups 3 and 4 gather around the perimeter of the circle, facing the circle.

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. 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). For younger grades, children can debate on whether there should be homework each night or whether the school day should be longer or shorter.

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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. 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. Have four to six student volunteers come to the front of the class. Each one should choose a person that they will play during this game. You may want to restrict them using a theme, e.g. ‘famous people from history’ or ‘characters from Harry Potter.