Digital Resources for Physics & Astronomy Education (comPADRE)
ComPADRE's role within the National Science Digital Library is to supply the educational resources used by broad communities in physics and astronomy. It is a partnership of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT), the American Astronomical Society (AAS), the American Institute of Physics/Society of Physics Students (AIP/SPS), and the American Physical Society (APS). The service helps teachers and learners find, and use, high quality resources through collections and services tailored to their specific needs. Authors are developing simulations, curricula, and multimedia for a wide range of topics and all education levels; science education researchers are developing research-based models of effective teaching and learning; organizations are providing workshops for teachers to improve their knowledge and skills; and students are communicating about learning physics. ComPADRE is supporting these author/user communities through discovery, organization, description, and sharing of their resources to achieve greater effectiveness for physics and astronomy education.
The ComPADRE structure is both distributed and centralized; it combines the creation of multiple community-focused collections to meet user needs with the provision of central support and services for economy and scalability. This is analogous to the central services provided by a professional society to publish multiple journals focusing on the needs of diverse research communities. The ComPADRE collections focus on the needs of specific communities for "high quality" materials selected and organized specifically for their members. These collections "speak the users' language". ComPADRE's central services support these specialized collections, reduce duplication, and provide interoperability and resource sharing. Design and editorial procedures help streamline the creation of new collections.
Further Reading