Penn State University will establish a resource center for materials science and engineering education. The center will collect, classify and disseminate existing and newly developed teaching resources for the K-16 materials education community. All forms of teaching aids, electronic, print and video, will be included. The teaching resource center will be a dispersed center: coordination will be centered at Penn State; collection and classification of materials will be coordinated by Penn State, Purdue University and the U. of Washington. The classified materials will be made available to the teaching community through a Web site at Purdue, the site is developed with support from TMS and AIME. The Web site will include a synopsis of the resource and information on its source and availability, with electronic links as appropriate. The collection of print and video materials will be housed at and disseminated by Penn State, with support from the Materials Education Council. Additional dissemination efforts include direct mailings and presentations. The center will develop evaluation tools of the individual resources to be utilized by the users of the resources.
The Teaching Resource Center, by disseminating the existence of available teaching tools and thus preventing inadvertent duplication of efforts, will impact the effectiveness of materials education in all institutions. %%% ***
