The challenge of teaching in the sciences is not only conveying knowledge in the discipline, but also developing essential critical thinking, data analysis, and scientific writing skills. I outline an exercise that can be done easily as part of a microbiology laboratory course. It teaches the nature of the research process, from asking questions and developing a testable hypothesis to writing a scientific paper, as well as the concepts of bacterial growth and two classic techniques for measuring bacterial growth, spectrophotometry, and standard plate method.