Via TwoSides, an interesting program (or programme, if you prefer) to try to get kids interested in and excited by print and paper: PrintIT!:

Schools throughout England, Scotland and Wales can participate in PrintIT! which comprises a six to eight week teaching course, through which students studying GCSE and A level Graphic Products, Product Design and Media Studies devise a print-focused campaign to promote Fairtrade products in a supermarket. The PrintIT! programme aims to encourage learners to consider a career path related to the UK printing and paper industries.

This year’s PrintIT will be sponsored by Antalis McNaughton, which is supplying the paper for the program. PrintIT! was established in 2005. Last year, more than 16,000 students in 350 schools participated. In a vaguely related story I came across recently, another school program—this time U.S. college students at Florida Atlantic University in a program called All On Paper—college journalists had to travel back in time and publish a newspaper the way it used to be done before there were computers.

What happens when you force college journalists to publish a newspaper with no computers? Well, first they freak out. Then they get their hands dirty. They write stories on manual typewriters and copyedit them in pencil. They shoot with film cameras and process the prints in a makeshift darkroom. They lay it all out with pica poles and proportion wheels. They paste it all up with X-Acto knives and rubber cement.

Sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists, it was highly amusing for those of us who remember the 1970s—and did a lot of these things. Remember when typewriters had no “1” key (you had to use a lowercase “l”)? That freaked the kids out. Remember when cameras used film? How do you turn a men’s room into an ersatz darkroom? How do you calculate how many words in a column inch? Fun times... It reminded me of yet another story I came across a couple of years ago in which a contemporary 13-year-old tries to figure out how an old Sony Walkman worked and couldn’t quite grasp the concept of the analog audio tape cassette:

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

Good times...