  Encouraging student engagement is a key aim in any educational setting, and
allowing students the freedom to pursue their own methods of solving problems
through independent experimentation has been shown to markedly improve this. In
many contexts, however, allowing students this flexibility in their learning is
hampered by constraints of the material itself, such as in the electronics
laboratory, where expensive and bulky equipment confines the learning
environment to the laboratory room. Finding ourselves in the position of
teaching one such laboratory course at the undergraduate level, we sought to
encourage students to learn through independent investigation and the pursuit
of personal projects, by providing a more flexible and inquiry-based learning
environment and allowing them to take their measurement equipment -- and their
learning -- beyond the laboratory itself. We present this project as a case of
design both for and by students, with the lead designer undertaking the project
after attending the course in question, and pursuing its development as a
foundational step in their graduate career. We discuss the challenges and
opportunities we encountered over the course of the design and development
process, and the eventual key output of the project: a portable, low-cost,
integrated electronics experimentation platform called the Winterlab board.
