Webber’s Debate Academy is pleased to invite you to our online World Schools Debate Tournament on March 1^st – 3^rd, 2024. We will be offering a Middle School Division (10-13 y.o) and a High School Division (14-19 y.o.), which will be run as two separate divisions THROUGHOUT the tournament.

Pedagogical Statement:

It is our goal to provide middle school debaters and high school debaters with online debate competitions that has motions specifically written for their level, the opportunity to compete against debaters from their same age group, with judges who are trained to give feedback that provides the best opportunity for growth in the age group for which they are judging.

World Schools Debate Format:

The debates will be in the World Schools Debate format using the WSDC rules and practices to conduct the rounds. We will allow each team to enter 3 to 5 debaters per team and we are planning to cap the tournament at 40 teams in each division so there are enough teams for it to be a rich and competitive learning experience but small enough to be manageable and ensure quality judging.

Motions:

Motions Announcement for WDA March 2024 Tournament

Hello Debaters, Coaches and Sponsors,

As promised, we are releasing the prepared motions for the WDA Tournament on March 1^st-3^rd, 2024.

Our motions committee has worked to provide three prepared motions that have many levels to each motion so that they may be used for high school and middle school.

At the same time, we will be presenting the impromptu topic areas, in no particular order, that will be used for the impromptu motions. The impromptu motions will differ between the high school tournament and the middle school tournament, but will both come from the same topic area for each impromptu round.

Here are the prepared motions that will be used in the high school and the middle school tournament:

R2) This House as the environmentalist movement would support the Solarpunk artistic movement.

R4) This House believes that developing countries should heavily invest in the creative economy as opposed to traditional industries.

Finals: This House believes that K-12 schools should give all students the option of online learning through graduation.

The impromptu topic areas, in no particular order, will be as follows:

·      Gender/Feminism

·      African Coups

·      Freedom of Speech

·      Criminal Justice

·      Culture

We look forward to seeing you (albeit virtually) at the WDA World Schools Debate Tournament on March 1^st – 3^rd.

Please use this link to register, if you have not already:  https://forensicstournament.net/WDAworldschoolsdebate/24

IF YOU ARE A TEAM FROM OUTSIDE THE USA, you will need to us ZZ as your state when you create your school account. The rest should be your regular address. 

Deadline for Team Entries: February 21, 2024 – schools will be charged for debaters entered at the end of this day.

Deadline for entry fee payment: February 28th, 2024 – Teams will be dropped if not paid by this date.

Deadline for Receiving Judge Information: February 21^st, 2024 – If we do not receive your judge information by this time, you will be charged a US$60 judge’s fee for each uncovered team.

TOURNAMENT SCHEDULE: (All times are US time zones)