What Buildacase is:
Buildacase’s goal is to provide beginners with a strong foundation, and to equip them with the things a lot of other courses and tutorials tend to take for granted.
- Clear and simple argument structure — the ability to convey information to a judge in the way you intend to convey, and to understand and ‘translate’ other debaters’ arguments into a coherent structure.
- Attentive and fastidious listening and observing.
- Rigorous and comprehensive comparison between arguments — the ability to refute opponents’ arguments and ‘weigh’ between reasonable opposing arguments.
We achieve this by treating debating less as an academic pursuit focusing on memorization and theorizing, and more like an athletic one. While concepts are certainly explained, they are hammered in through active drills and repetition.
These are not everything there is to know, but they lay down a solid foundation upon which everything else can be built. For example, while we do not touch much strategy, position burdens, or ‘meta-debating,’ such concepts rely on understanding how arguments logically interact and relate to one another and the intended motion — which is what we develop by working on comparison.
Who made Buildacase?
Buildacase was primarily created by Matt Aydin. However, they had a lovely team of supporters including Pranav Anand, Muzamil Godil, Leauren Ji, and Audrey Hsu. You can learn more about the Buildacase team here.
What can I expect from Buildacase in the future?
You can expect a course on judging and a course on advanced debating topics.
My vision for Buildacase is very simple: give debaters the tools and the skills they need to teach themselves how to be persuasive, for free.
As it is already, the website fulfills this vision relatively well. So, at this point, I’m totally fine doing nothing else with the site and just letting it be.
However, there are a few additional features that could significantly improve Buildacase’s value to debaters:
- Offering the course in more languages;
- Offering the courses over multiple mediums; and
- Marketing Buildacase to a larger audience of debaters.
If you (and other debaters) find Buildacase valuable, I will need your help to offer these additional features. Please help me make Buildacase better by:
- Advertising through word-of-mouth;
- Sharing the page with your debate club; and
- Structuring novice training around the program and freely disseminating it’s materials.
I will not attempt to monetize Buildacase. This website will remain perpetually as a free resource, forever.
What Buildacase is not:
A business: Buildacase is a registered, incorporated charity in Ontario, Canada. As such, we have a legal responsibility to devote our resources towards teaching debaters for free. In the rare instance we offer a paid program, we will never personally profit from it. Instead, we will reinvest all profits transparently back into scaling up the charity’s free programming.
A ploy to take your money or data or time: Buildacase will always remain free and the lessons on Buildacase will always remain public. We do not collect or store any data from you, and we will not sell your data. At some point, Buildacase may adopt ads on the site to cover it’s operating expenses (domain hosting and web development, the wonderful art you find in the lessons, language translation services, etc.)
A perfect, complete guide to becoming the best debater: Buildacase aims to “level the playing field” by equipping students with the language, skills, and exercises to teach themselves and understand other debate resources like video seminars, judge feedback, and paid coaching. It is not the only way to learn how to debate, and it is not necessarily the correct way to learn how to debate.
What is Matt Aydin up to now?
This might be useful for you to know since Matt runs the day-to-day operations of Buildacase and writes most of the articles.
(Updated February 6th, 2026, from my apartment in Toronto, Ontario. It is a dreary day at minus 10 degrees celsius. Piper is on my knee. meow)
Hi! I’m in my last semester of law school. I’ve been preparing for the Wilson moot and trying to stay motivated before I take the Ontario Bar exam.
I’ve been reading a lot of Substack. There’s a lot of AI slop there, but also some truly brilliant people who have changed the way I think about the world. Check out Henrick Karlsson’s essays on attention, building the life you want, and the childhoods of exceptional people. Why Margaret Atwood is a self-obsessed racial chauvinist. Or, confusingly, charli xcx’s ruminations on popularity.
Even just watching how people discuss and share art on Substack is fascinating. I mean, just look at Gustav Klimt’s floral paintings. Are you kidding me right now?!? This is the type of work I look at, and I think to myself: what am I even doing with my life right now?
Until next time~
Buildacase 