Skills That Kids Pick Up at Debate Camp last throughout the year

In a digitized world, debate camp makes learning more meaningful and teaches skills that stick with kids througout the school year, says the high school teacher who founded the schools.

| 22 Jan 2025 | 11:54

Educator Nicolas Szymanis, a high school teacher by training, still finds himself stepping back from the school day and questioning ‘where is the learning here? How can teaching professionals make learning meaningful and have what children learn ‘stick’?”

Szymanis had friends who had access to a vacant school in Boston. So in the summer of 2003, Szymanis and his wife brought roughly 30 kids to that school—kids who were not already “doing soccer camp,” but who sought to “think and work with their mind”—for a week.

“From the first camp in 2003 where we were running around, playing games on a beautiful campus, jumping in for a swim in between [debating] stuff—that was a true value proposition, right?” Szymanis said.

“Your kids coming home tired, full of ideas, and their laundry is dirty, and they made 25 new friends who like talking about what they read in the Economist at age 14—how rare is that?”

Since that first summer, Szymanis has expanded his camps to 15 locations in Canada and the U.S. , including New York. The core of their camp programs are the debate programs. Middle school and high school-aged kids are placed in groups according to their ages and debating experience. The debates are done in three different styles, at four different levels. In this format, Szymanis believes, kids retain information more than they do in the classroom.

“We believe that ‘camp’ creates a novel and secure learning environment in which campers feel safe to try new skills, think on their feet, see the opposing view, and to trust their teammates,” Szymanis wrote on the Debate Camp website.

“Campers repeatedly inform us of how successful their academic experiences are after Debate Camp, largely because they felt emboldened and confident in their ability to engage in discourse on subjects they felt unsure about only weeks previous.”

At Debate Camp, kids discuss topics such as “Are kids in grade school too young for cell phones?”; “Is lying always wrong?”, and “Should we sacrifice economic growth for environmental sustainability?”

Szymanis believes that kids can learn more during their week at camp than they tend to do during the school year.

“I watched analytical thinking skills, true acquisition and retention of knowledge...more so in a single concentrated experience than in three to four months of teaching history, teaching English, writing, reading, whatever,” Szymanis said.

Despite the camp’s focus around debating, they do more than just sit and talk all day. A typical daily schedule in the Day Camp sees kids learning how to debate, spending time outside, and playing learning-based games.