 If you walked out of your home without knowing you’d accidentally time traveled into

the past, how long would it take you to realize what had happened? What if they had
sent you back ten years, or thirty, or a hundred? Discuss with your team: how far into
the past would you need to be to realize instantly that you were in a different era?
 One clue to your whenabouts might be the text around you: not just the headlines on
newspapers and store signs, but the fonts they’re printed in. Consider some of the
history of typography, then discuss with your team: how different would the world
look today if Microsoft had chosen Comic Sans instead of Calibri as its default
typeface in the early 2000s—or as its successor 20 years later. The London
Underground also decided to update its font in 2016 for a more modern look—did it
succeed? Be sure to learn the difference between serif and sans serif fonts, and then
see which ones are used more widely. Does the same distinction apply in non-
Western alphabets?
 Recently, the United States Department of State changed its own default font from
Times New Roman to Calibri—20 years after first switching from Courier to Times
New Roman. Each move sparked at least 36 points of controversy. Discuss with your
team: should governments even have standardized fonts? If so, how should they pick
them, and when should they change them?
 If all these fonts confuse you—or you just want to check whether a document (such as
an alternative World Scholar’s Cup outline) is a forgery—you could always hire a
forensic font expert. Read about the kind of work such experts do, then discuss with
your team: should some fonts be reserved for exclusive use by AIs and others for
humans?
 Time travelers often struggle to pay for things; their currency has a cancelled Marvel
actor’s face on it, or they don’t know what money is, or they can’t make the self-
checkout machines work. (Then again, can anyone?) If you found yourself at a
supermarket in 1963, you wouldn’t have been able to pay for anything at all until the
clerk typed in the price of every item you wanted to buy, one at a time. Doing so
quickly was a coveted skill: there was even a competition with prizes like free trips to
Hawaii. The adoption of the barcode in the 1960s was a buzzkill for such price-
inputting savants. Discuss with your team: what other technologies do we take for
granted when we’re at stores or shopping online? And do you support efforts to
reimagine in-person shopping without any form of checkout at all?
 Just as barcodes transformed checkout, QR codes have changed many other everyday
experiences, from debate tree distribution (sometimes) to accessing restaurant menus.
But a change that seemed inevitable during the pandemic has run into resistance
since. Discuss with your team: is this pushback a classic example of society resisting
technological progress, only to eventually succumb? Are there any technologies that
were supposed to change the world which were rejected and stayed rejected?