Deboot

Inspiration

In an increasingly polarized world, people retreat into echo chambers and avoid engaging with those who think differently. They steer clear of controversial topics and miss opportunities for meaningful conversation. As motivated high schoolers who are fascinated by how technology has transformed communication in the modern era, we asked ourselves: What if we could gamify the discussion of polarized opinions, making it enjoyable?

What it does

Players join a session and complete a quick survey detailing your interests. Two participants are randomly paired, with our AI presenting a question of interpretation. The paired players engage in a timed chat while the rest of the group watches and votes on the best responses at the end. Points are awarded based on votes.

How we built it

• Frontend: React with Tailwind CSS for responsive UI
• Backend: Prisma and SQLite for data storage, with in-memory datastores for temporary game state
• Real-time Communication: Socket.io-client for connections instead of polling
• AI Engine: Claude Sonnet 4.5 for generating personalized debate questions based on player interests and evaluating argument quality
• Dual-screen system: Player view (/player) for phones and Display view (/display) for shared screens
• Smart connection management: Heartbeat system that checks client-server health every 2 seconds, auto-disconnecting after 7 seconds of silence

Challenges we ran into

NextJS was not designed for WebSockets. The implementation of WebSockets was not pretty to put it lightly, and lots of documentation discouraged it, citing the fact that Vercel doesn’t support WebSockets.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are exceptionally proud of our AI implementation to generate a thought-provoking debatable question, based on user interests. Our final product of creating a real-time debate platform that encourages healthy discussion instead of arguments is something we are proud to have built.

What's next for Deboot

In the future, we will continue to build upon our prototype, and implement more gamification techniques. We are considering adding a leaderboard that ranks the students the points they gain each round, tournament style competition, and haptics when they submit an argument or rebuttal. In the future, we would also like to be able to add a larger network of users across the globe so users with even more polarized perspectives can interact with each other. Conversing about controversial topics doesn’t have to be something to get uncomfortable about. With Deboot - discussing these topics are as easy, safe, and fun as playing a simple game!

Built With

• claude
• next.js
• node.js
• prisma
• react
• socket.io
• sqlite
• typescript
• websockets