Or, as David Paul, principal of Seattle’s Pathfinder Elementary School, puts it, "They certainly don’t connect those container with the Nikes of their feet."

That may change this fall, however, when one particular container will get a send-off with considerable fanfare: Busloads of excited students will wave good-bye, television crews will tape the action — and a dedicated Web site, www.apl.com/boomerangbox, will track the container around the Pacific Rim. In the classrooms at Pathfinder School and around the country, students will use the Web site to follow this container's peregrinations. They will track routes and contents, learn about international trade, commodities, foreign ports of call, worldwide weather patterns, currency exchange, shipping jobs — you name it.
 

Seattle high school students design "postage stamp" art for application to a cargo container.

The project is dubbed "Boomerang Box" because it illustrates the two-way nature of global trade. It is the brainchild of APL (American President Lines) shipping firm — commemorating the opening of its new state-of-the-art super-terminal — and officials at the Port of Seattle, eager to educate the public about international trade in a state where one out of four jobs depends on it. When they proposed the idea to educators from a group of Seattle schools (a consortium of six public schools called the Sound Schools), teachers ran with the idea. Students at those schools have already had the fun of creating artwork for the container — painting "postage stamps" to represent kids'-eye views of the Pacific Northwest, Asia, trade goods, shipping, and the like. Selected drawing have been enlarged and applied to the sides of the container.