A lecturer at the University of Queensland has developed an excellent model to give students an authentic, hands-on experience of ecological research. The first-year university students have been learning about biodiversity as they carry out the task of beetle identification. This partnership gives the students a chance to contribute to an existing study of urban biodiversity and contextualises the topics about which they are learning. Combining the work of researchers with the educational experiences of students is beneficial to both parties and can be successfully replicated by teachers in their classrooms. Partnering with an existing research project is one of the easiest ways to give students a contextualised real world experience of the scientific process. This paper examines how teaching and research were combined and makes suggestions for similar entomology projects that could be undertaken by school students in their local areas.