On a spring morning in Maine, traps made of nets rise above vernal pools in a small wetland, ready to collect salamanders. The traps were designed by groups of rural and urban high school students from Maine and Massachusetts participating in the University of Maine Upward Bound Math Science Program (UBMS) at the university campus in Orono, Maine. This article describes how students worked together with instructors and a scientist in a design project involving sustainability research. The student groups designed and built traps to help the ecologist compare the types of habitat selected by two genetically related salamanders. Using the final design, the University of Maine Student Chapter of the Wildlife Society constructed 90 traps, and the researcher tested them in a wetland. The traps worked well and were used in an ongoing full-scale research project.