Consider hangboarding [1]. It looks nothing like climbing, but all elite climbers spend an enormous amount of time on this activity. You will find the same in any other sport.
I want you to consider something important: this is an EDUCATIONAL activity. The activity does not exist for you. It exists for the students.
So: what is your learning objective? What do you want to teach the students?
> That video doesn't resemble anything anyone normal would recognize as debate.
Debates don't look like that video until students have 3-4 years of experience in competitive debate.
The thing that normal people recognize as debate is, in fact, a fairly useless educational activity after 3-6 months of participation.
Beyond that initial period, it doesn't teach good oration skills. It doesn't teach good negotiation skills. It doesn't even teach procedural skills that might be useful in a courtroom, boardroom, or even legislature. And it certainly doesn't teach research skills or quick thinking.
Debating for a lay audience is, to put it simply, a shallow and mostly non-transferable skill. At least after the first six months. It IS a useful skill, but spending more than a semester on that skill in the context of competitive debate tournaments is -- to put it mildly -- a massive waste of students' time.
The contrived game in the video above is designed to additionally teach:
1. research skills,
2. quick thinking, and
3. the ability to quickly synthesize a large amount of information into a coherent narrative.
Those skills are useful in boardrooms, in court rooms, and in legislative sessions. They are transferable, most of all, to the vast majority of high paying jobs where you do not spend your entire day talking to people. For example, holding all of that context in your head and quickly forming a narrative to solve a problem (winning the round) has a lot in common with debugging or working through a complicated mathematical model.
And students only progress to this version of debate after they have mastered the basics of persuasive oral communication (what you want to see). To wit: the "speak pretty for normal audiences" type of debate is available in United States. Students who participate in the type of debate in this video regularly enter and win tournaments that have a more lay format. As a joke, for kicks. They have already largely mastered the lay format by the time they progress to the non-lay format. At least, that's true for my students.
> If normal people can't even understand what you're saying they can't possibly be persuaded so you have totally failed at debate.
Normal people don't judge these rounds, so this is largely a moot point. And, again, the students in this video are capable of speaking extremely persuasively to normal people. The fact that they choose to participate in a more pedagogically useful activity doesn't somehow erase their ability to do so.
[1] https://www.climbing.com/skills/how-to-hangboard/
