Debate 101

Debate 101 is an unincorporated non-profit collective bridging the gap between novice learners and elite competition through tools, community, and strategy.

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Vivaan Shahani · Arjun Gupta · Max McBride · Max Feinstein

What's in this repo

Path	What it is
index.html	The main site — a single-page app served straight from GitHub Pages
flow/	Cascade, our keyboard-first flowing app for web and desktop
desktop/	The Electron shell that packages Cascade as a native app
tools/card-cutter/	Cut, highlight and cite debate evidence in the browser
tools/speed-trainer/	Spreading practice with a live WPM meter and a clarity score
tools/round-tracker/	Competition record, judge book, and scouting book
data/content.json	Team bios, resources and lecture data the site loads at runtime

Everything is static and client-side. No build step, no server, no accounts.

Cascade

Cascade is a flowing app for Lincoln–Douglas, Policy, Public Forum and Parliamentary debate. It runs at debate101.org/flow and as a desktop app, works fully offline, and reads and writes .ebb files that are byte-compatible with ebb — so a flow moves between the two apps without conversion.

Beyond the grid: speech/prep/cross-ex timers on official times, dropped-argument detection, answer links, voice-assisted capture, a block library with trigger expansion, round analytics, and an evidence tracker.

See flow/README.md and flow/ARCHITECTURE.md.

Running the site locally

The main site is a Vite + React app and needs a build. Cascade and the standalone tools are not — they are plain static apps that get copied into the output untouched.

npm install
npm run dev

Then open http://localhost:5173. /flow and /tools resolve in dev too, because Vite serves the project root statically.

npm run build     # -> dist/
npm run preview   # serve dist/ exactly as it will deploy

Where to edit what

You want to change	Edit
Site copy, layout, design	src/ (pages/, components/, styles/)
Resources, lectures, team bios, FAQ	data/content.json — no rebuild needed to change data, only to change how it renders
Cascade	flow/ — plain ES modules, no build step
Card Cutter / Speed Trainer / Round Tracker	tools/<name>/index.html — self-contained, no build step

index.html at the repo root is now the Vite entry point, not the site itself. The previous single-file site is preserved verbatim at legacy/index.html.

The AI features run on-device (see src/lib/ai.js), so no API key is required; config.example.js explains what is left of the old key plumbing.

Images

Team headshots in assets/ are full-resolution originals (46 MB in total). The site serves 640px derivatives from assets/opt/, and the build deliberately leaves the originals out of dist/. Regenerate the derivatives after adding a photo:

sips -s format jpeg -s formatOptions 78 -Z 640 assets/NAME.png --out assets/opt/NAME.jpg

Building the desktop app

cd desktop && npm install && npm start

See desktop/README.md for packaging installers.

License

This project is open source under the Debate 101 Non-Commercial Open Source License v1.0 (LICENSE, SPDX: D101-NC-OS-1.0).

You may use, copy, modify, and redistribute the code freely for non-commercial purposes — school debate prep, teaching, research, team workflows, and community hosting at no charge. Commercial use (selling the software, paid access, or using it as part of a for-profit product or service) is not permitted without separate written permission from the Debate 101 Collective.

Credit

Cascade implements the .ebb file format from the ebb project by Shreeram Modi. Cascade is an independent Debate 101 project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by ebb.