What's on my surfaces? design and implementation of an indoor surface films CURE-inspired project

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) allow all students to engage in undergraduate research experiences and gain important skills such as problem solving and critical thinking. The goal of this work was to design a CURE-inspired project for an upper-level analytical chemistry laboratory course that engaged students in novel research to detect and quantify the amount of nitrate and nitrite in indoor surface films. The students searched for and read literature on indoor surface films, collected samples from a location of their choosing, quantitatively analyzed the samples with HPLC, and created a customer report to describe their findings. Two semesters of implementation revealed that the project successfully engaged students in elements of the research process and met many of the learning goals. Student focus group interviews revealed that students were personally invested in the research process because they were investigating indoor spaces where they spend a lot of time and that they perceived this laboratory experience to resemble that of authentic research.