ComPADRE: Communities of Physics and Astronomy Digital Resources in Education

Mercury, March/April 2004 Table of Contents

by Susana E. Deustua

To facilitate better teaching and better learning, a group of professional organizations is creating a digital repository of educational resources and information.

ComPADRE is a joint project of the American Association of Physics Teachers, the American Astronomical Society, the American Institute of Physics/Society of Physics Students, and the American Physical Society. The project’s goals are to provide focused collections of educational resources that support communities whose core membership belongs to and identifies with the societies. Indeed, the partnership of physics and astronomy professional societies is vital to the success of comPADRE since these societies provide a stable, sustaining force for the disciplines so that the collections developed here will not depend on the continuing efforts of a single person or small group. However, these resources are also available to a broad audience outside the societies.

ComPADRE is currently funded by a two-year grant from the National Science Foundation’s NSDL (National Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education Digital Library) program. The NSDL is an NSF effort to support science literacy, at all levels, through access to the materials and methods by which we discover the nature of the physical universe—by enabling the creation of innovative digital libraries for science education and a community for individuals focused on science education. The NSDL program is unusual in that all its projects are essentially in partnership geared to building an enterprise larger than any single grant.

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