Debate Camps
Our virtual and in-person debate training camps provide a great opportunity to get good at debate fast! Over the course of five days, you’ll work with our team of experienced intercollegiate debate coaches to learn and practice skills that will help you in debate, education, and life: critical thinking, research, public speaking, teamwork, and much more. While our various camps focus on different debate formats, each camp teaches the same core skills that can be applied to any format.
Intro to Debate Camps
In your Intro to Debate camp, you’ll participate in fun and engaging activities designed to help you develop the key concepts and skills required to succeed in debate, including organizing your thoughts, building clear and succinct arguments, note-taking, fast-paced critical thinking, framing an issue, budgeting time, public speaking, asking good questions about new information, responding to opposing points of view, crystallizing key points and making a final pitch to an audience, being creative, adapting to challenges, determining what is relevant in material, and more! Once you’re comfortable with the basics, you’ll debate fun topics with your peers, such as whether school uniforms should be required and whether dogs are better than cats!
Key details
- No experience necessary.
- Recommended for ages 10-15; younger students will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
- Time commitment: beyond meetings, some light homework (estimated to be less than 1 hour per day) is assigned to help reinforce what’s been learned.
- All campers receive a Ready Set Debate Member Handbook when they register, unless they have already been provided one in a previous activity.
Advanced Debate Camps
In your advanced debate camp, you’ll explore key concepts in debate theory and strategy through a series of discussions, activities, in-meeting debates, and homework to prepare for debates and reinforce concepts such as analyzing the resolution, identifying the burdens of each side in a given debate, researching and evaluating evidence, incorporating evidence into your case, using the stock issues to identify different kinds of arguments, identifying logical fallacies, identifying errors in evidence and statistical reasoning, weighing impacts, and addressing concepts in political science, economics, and philosophy that appear frequently in debate contexts.
Key details
- Prerequisite: Any Intro to Debate camp and/or previous experience with a debate program or team.
- Recommended for students aged 13-17; younger students will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
- Time commitment: beyond meetings, moderate homework (estimated to be about 2-3 hours per day) is assigned to help reinforce what’s been learned.
- All campers receive a Ready Set Debate Member Handbook when they register, unless they have already been provided one in a previous activity.
Tuition
The base tuition for a single camp session is $295 USD, with increasing discounts as you register for more camps. Current Ready Set Debate members should contact us to inquire about member-exclusive discounts.
- One camp session: $295 USD
- Two camp sessions: $550 USD (save $40)
- Three camp sessions: $750 USD (save $135)
- Four camp sessions: $900 USD (save $280)
Please contact us at info@readysetdebate.com or call/text (310) 662-3255 if you want to register for more than four camp sessions.
Camp FAQs
Yes. Please arrange with the coach of your student’s camp if you would like to observe meetings.
Yes! Different camps focus on different debate formats and topics, and coaches will customize students’ activities and goals to help facilitate continued learning. Many students have attended four or more camps with us.