The OpenCTD has been on whirlwind of development over the last few years. Thanks to support from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the National Marine Sanctuaries Foundation, and Patreon, we've be pushing hard to turn this DIY project into something durable, reliable, accurate, and inexpensive. The end result is Rev6 of the OpenCTD. 

The new OpenCTD can be built in less than a day by experienced makers. But if you've never touched a soldering iron, you can still make a CTD over a long weekend. And despite a truly wild supply chain over the last 2 years, you can still build one for about $350. 

Read a bit more about our vision and the current arc of the project here: Community Oceanography with low-cost, open-source CTDs

And here's where we need you help: The OpenCTD has been a DIY project since its inception, but more and more school and university programs are asking for something to take the guesswork out of sourcing parts and standardizing OpenCTD assembly. In short, we need a kit, that people can buy and be guaranteed that they have everything they need to make their own CTD. We're testing workflows, creating and trialing a syllabus, and figuring out what needs to be assembled in advance to maximize the learning potential of an OpenCTD kit while working within the time constraints of an education program. 

And that's what we need from the Hackaday Prize: expertise to get us from a program that has built and deployed CTDs around the world to one that can better assist ocean-loving communities to build their own standardized CTD that they can trust to collect oceanographic data.