The primary goals of the proposed course are to provide students with experience: (1) developing and building custom measurement tools, (2) designing and conducting real-world research, and (3) understanding the capabilities and limitations of emerging tools being wides used by academic, commercial, and citizen scientists. The proposed course will be a project-based experience in which students learn about available technologies, then design, test and evaluate measurement tools by using them to collect data in self-designed field and lab experiments. Students will work in small groups to design and build a prototype instrument and use it to collect real-world data. which tell will analyze to evaluate their design capabilities, as well as the environmental parameters they choose to measure.