An increased awareness of the current and past misuses of the Atlantic tidewater areas has led many people to suggest that the public must be educated in the makeup and function of the littoral zone. As with the teaching of anything, this could be accomplished most effectively by introducing the subject into the regular school curriculum. The Oceanographic Education Center, an office funded under the Title III program and administered by the Falmouth, Massachusetts School system has been seeking ways of doing this. An experimental summer program was devised which would not only supplement intermediate school level science curricula with projects that are meaningful to the students of this area, but which would also serve as a medium by which general science could be taught. The program was designed to meet the requirements predicated by three objectives: 1. to stimulate the interest of young students in the marine sciences, and especially in estuarine ecology, by guiding them in carrying out their own scientific projects; 2. to instruct students in the scientific method of field observation and laboratory investigation; 3. to teach basic principles of general science by taking advantage of the fact that the study of oceanography necessarily involves the study of all the major scientific disciplines. It was decided that the best approach would be to present the program as a four week environmental survey of a salt water estuary. Each student was allowed to pursue, at his own pace, whatever subject area was of the most personal interest to him. The only restraint imposed upon the students' freedom was that whatever data they recorded in their own area of interest, it had to be accompanied by comprehensive environmental data. (See Fig. 1) This was done in order to stress the interrelationships among scientific disciplines as well as the complex interdependencies among the plants, the animals, and their environment. Because Dr. Shields Warren of the Sea Farm Research Foundation generously offered the use of part of its laboratory facilities located on Bournes Pond, it was possible to perform field work and laboratory analyses at the same location. Bournes Pond is a typical Atlantic estuary, approximately two miles long and averaging 200 yards in width. It has a small fresh water inlet and a slightly larger outlet to Vineyard Sound. It is a nursery ground for many species, and has the added advantage that in the summer both northern and southern fauna are present. The equipment used in the program was as simple as possible. With the exception of a Bausch and Lomb student spectrophotometer, a Millipore? filtration kit and a Nikon binocular microscope equipped with an inexpensive adapter for photomicroscopy, all equipment was either readily available from the school system or inexpensively made by the students from items purchased at the hardware store. Two small motor boats equipped with three and four horsepower outboards were used. The ten young people who volunteered for the program were quite heterogeneous with regard to age and ability. They ranged from students entering the seventh to one student entering the tenth grade. Although they were all interested in the natural