Ensuring that students understand the basis behind their geography/science courses is an essential part of their education. This article looks at an inexpensive and rigorous way of teaching students how to develop the needed data for remote sensing work. The procedure shows instructors how to build a system to teach students the process of building their own library of spectral signatures to help interpret remote sensing data. The relatively simple and inexpensive system outlined here can be built and run by students as part of a larger curriculum in geography, earth science, and/or ecology.