The arena of investigation of star formation and its scaling laws is slowly, but consistently, shifting from the realm of luminous galaxies to that of faint ones and to subgalactic regions, as existing and new facilities enable investigators to probe regions of the combined parameter space of surface brightness, wavelength, and angular resolution that were inaccessible until a few years ago. We summarize what has been accomplished, and what remain as challenges in the field of galactic-scale star formation.