Honours research experience is a core component of preparing our Bioscience graduates for independent enquiry and research practice. Providing authentic research experience at scale, however, poses challenges for laboratory resources, supervision, and ensuring that each student develops ownership of their work. Here, I reflect on my 2025/26 implementation in Microbiology of a Structured Project framework developed at Abertay University. As a Teaching Fellow in the Life Sciences, I designed and supervised four BSc (Hons.) Biomedical Science research projects. Bacterial contamination of cell and tissue cultures can compromise experimental validity and reproducibility in biomedical research. The projects addressed this microbiological challenge by investigating complementary indirect approaches for detecting bacterial contamination in liquid culture media. The overarching research question was sub-divided mechanistically, with each student exploring a complementary aspect of bacterial growth and metabolism. The four projects examined turbidity as a proxy for biomass accumulation, utilisation of reducing sugars as metabolic substrates, consumption of dissolved oxygen, and concomitant changes in the physicochemical environment of the medium, including pH and redox state. This Structured Project model supported scalable Honours project provision, while providing opportunities for students to develop independence in experimental design, and data generation and interpretation, within the IBMS-accredited BSc (Hons.) Biomedical Science programme at Abertay University. The implementation demonstrates a transferable approach to Microbiology education in which a shared research problem is divided into complementary mechanistic questions, facilitating authentic enquiry and ownership within a coherent disciplinary framework, while supporting sustainable use of shared expertise, laboratory resources, and supervision.