Chemistry in Your Home Community: Design of a Final Project to Help Empower Students to Explore How Chemistry Connects to Their Home Communities

General Chemistry I is often taught in a way that has limited real-world connections, preventing students from seeing the relationship between chemistry and their everyday lives. One way to help students bridge this disconnect is through the design of nontraditional assignments. In this report, we share the design of a final project, called Chemistry in Your Home Community. This final project culminates with a presentation and is scaffolded throughout the semester. Students are given full agency in the choice of presentation topic and in how they present the information. The assignment is broken into the planning phase, the research phase, the presentation phase, and the follow up phase. A post-survey was used to measure how students feel about the assignment, specifically looking at how students view chemistry in their home communities and in the world around them, how students feel their scientific communication skills changed, and their overall enjoyment of the assignment. This final project has helped students connect chemistry to the world around them and have a personal relationship to the subject.