[japhyr]

Fair questions.

Word works well for students' final work, but it seems to get in the way when students are building their understanding of a topic. I like that Markdown has enough formatting options to organize a document, but not so many options that people get lost in modifying fonts and font sizes, etc.

I'm curious to see if using Markdown while doing exploratory assignments would help students focus more on the information they're learning and documenting, rather than how the final document looks. I'd also like to expose students to a different approach to structuring documents; for many of them, they haven't used anything other than Word.