CLICK. BUILD. LEARN

ASEE Prism, Sep 2007 by Mathias-Riegel, Barbara

That honor is embodied in a recent major partnership between TE and Engineering Pathway (EP), the comprehensive digital engineering education library based at the University of California at Berkeley. According to Sullivan, TE will by no means lose its identity but rather will exist as a stand-alone collection within EP "This partnership with Pathway is a good thing, because it will increase access and traffic to TE," she says.

Alice M. Agogino, the Berkeley professor of mechanical engineering who heads Pathway, considers TE the library's premier collection. "There's great synergy here," she says. The partnership with TE "makes us more attractive for professional societies."

FILLING HOLES

According to Sullivan, TE has spent the past 18 months studying what teachers need and want, comparing this with what TE offers. "We found there were giant holes, so we've been working very ^diligently to fill those gaps," Sullivan says. Whether teachers need to know about the body's respiratory system, rock cycles, ecology or weather forecasting, they should be able to find it in TE, thanks to an influx of new lessons and activities. Workshops for teachers are also being offered on how to use the TE Web site, as well as how to submit their own lesson plans for publication.

One of the biggest hurdles in the past two years has been finding the ideal method for aligning the TE curriculum with state teaching requirements. Originally TE developers used standards from the four states represented by the TE team and correlated them with national standards. "Our plan didn't work, but it was a good learning opportunity," says Martha Cyr, K-12 Outreach director at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. After looking at several different options, Cyr and other TE team members, including Rene Reitsma from Oregon State University's College of Business, agreed on an approach that incorporates standards from every state. "Ultimately, this benefits the K-12 teachers from all 50 states because the resources will be more accurately matched to the standards that they are required to meet," Cyr says.

According to Reitsma, TE is working on ways to help teachers understand how standards compare between states and whether particular standards apply to specific items in a curriculum.

Some things in TE have been tweaked a little. Living Labs-Web portals to archived data from real-world systems-remains a favorite part of TE's collection. "We're concentrating on the same Living Labs as we did in the past two years: wind and water," says Mike Mooney from the Colorado School of Mines. "But we've made the graphical interface more kid-friendly by using Google Maps, a terrific resource that is easy to understand and appealing to the students."

Mooney describes a lesson in which students determine whether wind turbines are practical for a particular site or city. By accessing several locations around the country that have real-time wind data from the National Weather Service, as well as using archives of wind data, the students develop a graphical user base using Google Maps.