A Tool for Researching and Presenting Evidence in High School and College Debates

Debate provides a valuable educational opportunity for students to learn a variety of portable research and public speaking skills, but many of its goals are hindered by the lack of a dedicated software. Currently, the primary tool for research and presentation of evidence is paperlessdebate.com's Verbatim, which is built as a template for Microsoft Word. While functional, Verbatim suffers from several shortcomings; its reliance on Word means that it cannot be fully cross-platform, and it also means that it is difficult to streamline Verbatim's workflow for the particular needs of debaters. Thus, the goal of this project was to fill the need for a stand-alone, cross platform application that debaters (and coaches) can use to research and present evidence. The bulk of the project consisted of creating a specialized editor, including a variety of features catered towards usability in a range of debate contexts. Additionally, the software is integrated with a back end database such that it can also replace the mixture of storage solutions (such as Dropbox and Microsoft's OneDrive) that teams currently use to maintain and share their data. In order to make the software more extensible and to improve its accessibility, it is released as free open source software under the GNU General Public License v3.0. This paper describes the core features of the application and the motivation behind those features' implementations, and briefly includes a discussion of the companion mobile app for Android devices. It also reviews the technologies that were used to create the software's implementation.