Achieving the low emittances necessary for a muon collider requires ionization cooling. Much of that cooling occurs in compact cooling cells where superconducting coils and conventional RF cavities are closely interleaved [1]. The real challenges for these cooling cells reside in their engineering challenges: high field solenoids, RF cavities, and absorbers, often designed near technological limits, placed in close proximity to each other. We thus propose to build a prototype ionization cooling cell to demonstrate the capability of constructing an ionization cooling channel reaching the lowest emittances and to provide engineering input for the design of such beamlines. The magnets and cavities will be powered at their design values, and an absorber will be included along with a mechanism for heating the absorber similarly to how a beam would.