Debatekeeper – debate timer

Chuan-Zheng Lee

About this app

Let Debatekeeper take the hassle out of timekeeping! It will sound bells automatically at the right times, or it can vibrate and/or flash your screen as quieter cues, allowing you to focus your attention on the debate.

Debatekeeper automatically switches to the appropriate speech time in styles that require it, e.g. those with reply speeches. It supports most parliamentary styles, including British Parliamentary (WUDC), World Schools (WSDC), Australs, American Parliamentary (APDA), Canadian Parliamentary, Asian Parliamentary (UADC), Australian Easters, and New Zealand university styles. More styles can be downloaded in the app from the online repository.

You can also write your own debate format (style) in XML for the app to use—see the app wiki at https://github.com/czlee/debatekeeper/wiki for details. Submissions to the online formats repository are welcome: https://github.com/czlee/debatekeeper-formats

Debatekeeper is also highly configurable with things like overtime bells and the preparation timer.

(Debatekeeper does not support the American policy, public forum or Lincoln-Douglas styles, because it doesn't support prep time between speeches distributed at teams' election, sorry.)

Advice for adjudicators: It can pay to make sure your debaters (a) know what the bell sounds like, so they don't think you just got a text message and (b) can hear the bell. It's normally loud enough in classrooms, but not lecture theatres; in those rooms you can use the vibrate/flash screen functions to remind you to clap.

Ratings and reviews

pretty good, but no option to customise speaker time signals. for example, there's no option for hs bp, which has 30 seconds of protected time at the start & end of each speech. I'll be using the regular timer app haha. if you want automatic time signals, just set several timers. *edit: ive been using the prep timer to time speeches & give time signals and it works great! in settings (3 dots) there's an option called "prep timer bells" that you can use to set bells.

It does what it needs to without any hiccups. The one feature I think would make this app perfect would be having the ability to set a custom format, so that if you're using a format that isn't supported, or maybe you're using reduced timing for an unofficial debate you would still be able to have a good experience with the app. A more pleasant looking UI would also be a nice touch, but it's certainly not something important, unlike what I mentioned above.

Great app!!!! This is exactly what I was looking for and used it with great success in class today. Made a custom debate style for my format, it was easy, straight forward and quick. The github site was an excellent reference point for building the custom style. Thanks for developing this.

What’s new

Updated to target Android 13; Collapsed items in downloads by default; Fixed the colour of the navigation bar; Removed "Leader's" from reply speech names; Removed legacy support for debate formats in the "debatekeeper" directory and schema version 1.0