Cyber-Infrastructure for Multidisciplinary STEM Education (CIMSE)

The Cyber-Infrastructure for Multidisciplinary STEM Education initiative designs, develops, integrates, validates and widely disseminCIMSEates learning materials, instructional resources, interactive applets and evaluation tools for multidisciplinary STEM education. CIMSE resources improve content-delivery, pedagogical-utilization and knowledge-assessment in K-12 and college education, and are openly and anonymously available on the Internet to the entire community.

CIMSE aims to improve the quality, perception and effectiveness of STEM education at different levels using interactive tools, motivational examples, virtual games, cross-disciplinary engagement and modern information, technology and network resources. There are 2 types of CIMSE audiences – formal K-12 and college STEM learners, and informal distance learners. The needs of these two complementary groups are addressed by developing general STEM learning resources that can be customized for specific courses (formal settings) or used as reference, refresher or supplementary materials (informal learners. The scalability of the CIMSE resources derives directly from their collaborative-development and centralized-distribution, as well as their open, distributed and decentralized utilization via the Internet.