New math and science repository serves up the good stuff

Internet Scout, a 12-year-old University of Wisconsin–Madison online research project, is unveiling its new national math and science educational project this month called the Applied Math and Science Education Repository.

AMSER, for short, serves up applied math and science resources in an easy-to-use format. Though specifically created for teachers and students in the community and technical college sectors, AMSER is free for anyone to use.

“Community and technical colleges serve about half of our undergraduates nationally and are a critical component in creating a strong American workforce,” says Edward Almasy, co-director of Internet Scout. “AMSER aims to support that community with its collection of educational resources, as well as services that will help users rapidly incorporate those resources into teaching and learning environments.”

Users can find a wide assortment of materials at AMSER, from large Web sites focusing on an individual applied science or math topic to Flash animations that demonstrate specific science or math principles in action. AMSER also offers users a variety of features that they may recognize from shopping at sites like Amazon, including rating and commenting on resources and having new resources recommended to them. Users can also post comments to let others know how they adapted a resource.

“We really encourage users to offer feedback on the resources at AMSER. Letting other users know whether a resource was useful to them provides a level of authority that may help teachers make the decision about whether they’d like to use a specific resource in their classroom with greater confidence,” explains Almasy. “We’re very committed to serving up applied math and science materials that teachers and students can put to immediate use.”

Since 1994, Internet Scout has been working with quality online resources, focusing on developing better tools and services for finding, filtering and presenting online information and metadata by creating practical Web-based information and software solutions like AMSER for educators, librarians and researchers. Scout’s free Web based reports reach over 350,000 readers a week helping guide them to exemplary online resources.

Open source software packages developed at Scout are used by hundreds of organizations and individuals around the world to help them organize and showcase their materials on the Web. AMSER, Scout’s newest project, is funded by the National Science Foundation and is part of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL).