Dublin Students Create AI Tool For Legislation Analysis, Debate Simulation

DUBLIN, CA — Three Emerald High School students have built an AI platform that helps both understand and debate new legislation. EHS junior Alex Liao said that he and his teammates Arnav Kakani and Mrinal Agarwal were inspired to build DebateSim due to both barriers to proper debate prep and a political landscape awash in misinformation.

“As competitive debaters, we saw that debate resources and education is very limited – private coaching can cost up to hundreds per hour and prep groups are extremely hard to break into. The debate simulator feature is meant to allow better access to debate education, letting people practice and improve for free,” Liao said.

DebateSim - which stands for Debate Simulator - uses a combination of AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude to offer users a chance to debate a wide variety of topics, including current and proposed legislation, either against each other or against an AI model. Users can select a variety of debate formats, including a standard academic debate, a public forum debate, or a Lincoln-Douglass debate on philosophical topics. Users can select both topics and style of the opponent, which ranges from neutral AI to Donald Trump to Kamala Harris.

The team is currently developing a real-time Debate Training model, which will provide instant feedback on metrics like content, strategy, and word efficiency.

DebateSim also offers comprehensive analysis of current legislation. Users can select a current bill, and AI provides an executive summary of the bill, goals of the bill, and analysis of metrics like its economic impact, legal soundness, implementation feasibility, and more.

“We are all students who are engaged in the political world. However, the political world is very confusing – the social media we see and the news outlets published are often extremely biased and spread misinformation. The bill analysis feature helps combat that by letting people easily analyze and simplify politics around them,” Liao said.

While existing AI can analyze bills, Liao said that DebateSim takes away a lot of the work by offering a list of bills that it will analyze with the click of a button.

“DebateSim gets rid of all of those intermediate steps and makes it as easy as possible to analyze legislation, along with offering multiple models, analyzing specific impacts on the user, and grading the bill based on pre-set criteria,” he said.

DebateSim is far from the only work this team has done. Liao is the treasure of the EHS Debate Club, and was the main developer for EHS’s bell schedule app. Kakani founded the EHS Programming Club, and hosted a district-wide hackathon, while Agarwal is ranked 20th nationally for public forum debate, according to DebateDrills rankings.

Visit debatesim.us for more information.

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