This article describes a culminating assignment for students enrolled in a human ecology course in a Masters in Science Education program. The goal of this assignment was for students to use published scientific data to link daily life, human impact, and sustainability to ecological function. This activity required students to consider the complicated task of making data accessible to younger learners while retaining data accuracy. This data-centric approach is broadly applicable to other science courses because the root requirement that students "show the data" reflects the heart of science. Requiring students to visit published scientific research and explain how the data are used to make conclusions is essential to their understanding of the scientific process and their learning how to evaluate the wealth of data and assertions that they encounter in their daily life. (Contains 1 table and 3 figures.)