TeachEngineering is a digital library of over 800 K-12 engineering lessons and hands-on activities. The lesson materials in TeachEngineering are developed by a variety of organizations and programs and are made available free-of-charge to educators.

The Oregon State University Open Source Lab is proud to provide hosting and system administration for the TeachEngineering website and development servers. TeachEngineering has become another great example of the use of open source at OSU.

Development of the collection was motivated by the following:

• To consolidate and make searchable a large amount of excellent curriculum that was previously dispersed over various organizations, and which was stored in different formats and different document structures.
• All learning materials in TeachEngineering use engineering as the vehicle to study math and science. As such, TeachEngineering is meant to promote the use of engineering as a means for learning in K-12 environments.
• TeachEngineering lessons and exercises are structured to fit teaching K-12 students and to provide K-12 science and math teachers with suitable and hands-on curriculum at no cost except their effort having to master and improve it. With this approach the collection developers hope to support teachers and students in poorer schools and districts.
• All teaching materials in TeachEngineering are 'aligned' with the mathematics, science and technology K-12 educational standards of all U.S. states as well as with the standards formulated by a variety of nongovernmental national standard bodies. This should make it easier for teachers to find curriculum that fits the standards to which they must teach.

Besides its HTML interface targeted at people, TeachEngineering both exposes and uses a variety of Web services. Among these are services to expose its collection's metadata to other collections―try, for example, a search for the term 'spaghetti' in the National Science Digital Library ―and services from third-party providers that help with the automatic alignment of curriculum and standards.

The collection and its software infrastructure are housed at Oregon State University's Open Source Lab and are almost entirely developed and implemented using open source software tools. Visit http://www.teachengineering.org for more information.

Photos (c) University of Colorado, used with permission.