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This paper presents the use of simple, outcome-based assessment tools to design and evaluate the first semester of a new introductory laboratory program created to teach green analytical chemistry using environmental samples. This general chemistry laboratory program, like many introductory courses, has a wide array of stakeholders within and beyond the major. Among the stakeholders, there was low-level yet widespread apprehension that changes in the introductory level content would weaken student preparation. Because of this unease, it was important to prove to faculty and students alike that the new laboratory program could effectively help students reach the new laboratory learning goals without sacrificing technical content. A set of simple assessment tools, student precision and accuracy data from experiments during the semester, and a laboratory practical and a student survey from the end of the semester were used as both formative and summative program assessments. This article establishes the power of these simple, course-embedded tools to yield insights into program strengths and weaknesses and, ultimately, to demonstrate to all faculty and students the effectiveness of this first-semester program.

The sophistication and success of recently reported microfabricated organs-on-chips and human organ constructs have made it possible to design scaled and interconnected organ systems that may significantly augment the current drug development pipeline and lead to advances in systems biology. Physiologically realistic live microHuman (μHu) and milliHuman (mHu) systems operating for weeks to months present exciting and important engineering challenges such as determining the appropriate size for each organ to ensure appropriate relative organ functional activity, achieving appropriate cell density, providing the requisite universal perfusion media, sensing the breadth of physiological responses, and maintaining stable control of the entire system, while maintaining fluid scaling that consists of ∼5 mL for the mHu and ∼5 μL for the μHu. We believe that successful mHu and μHu systems for drug development and systems biology will require low-volume microdevices that support chemical signaling, microfabricated pumps, valves and microformulators, automated optical microscopy, electrochemical sensors for rapid metabolic assessment, ion mobility-mass spectrometry for real-time molecular analysis, advanced bioinformatics, and machine learning algorithms for automated model inference and integrated electronic control. Toward this goal, we are building functional prototype components and are working toward top-down system integration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]