The purpose of this “paper” is to introduce Straw Bridge Challenge participants to an example of
a technical academic paper format. The format of this paper can be applied to almost any
science or lab project you might be asked write up from middle school all the way through
college. Historically this format was developed in the days of mechanical typewriters when
there was only one font and limited formatting options. With today’s word processors type fonts
and formatting options can be seemingly infinite. This becomes a problem as students can
become distracted with features of the word processor and forget the main point of the paper is to
communicate to the reader information about the study and what was learned during the course
of the project.