Research has shown that when students are given the opportunity to ask their own questions and design their own experiments, they become more interested in learning the answers. In this article, the author describes an effective method to do a field trip to the beach and gets her students to make observations about marine animals, come up with a testable question, design an experiment, use equipment to collect data, analyze their results, draw conclusions, and write a brief one-page report--all in seven hours! In addition they get a chance to test their knowledge on taxonomy and integrate concepts on major evolutionary trends of the animals observed. Although this is a beach field trip to study marine invertebrates, she recommends this strategy for other field trips regardless of the ecosystem or organism of interest. (Contains 2 tables and 3 figures.)