UNL Research in Physics Education Group

Physics Teacher's CD-ROM Toolkit

Thank you for your expressed interest in our CD-ROM project, the Physics InfoMall. We are a National Science Foundation funded project, creating a physics content CD-ROM targeted at the high school physics teacher. This CD-ROM is a collection of physics education resources designed to meet the needs of all educators who teach physics -- conceptual to advanced placement. The first field test version was completed in the fall of 1992. This project is being developed in collaboration with Kansas State University and is supported by funds from the National Science Foundation. Currently we are beta testing our third field test version with over 600 field testers. These are high school and college physics teachers who know of our project, have expressed interest, and are testing the disc and giving us feedback on their likes, dislikes.

Material on the CD-ROM has been selected and keyworded by physics content specialists such as our project head, Dr. Bob Fuller, and other notable physicists, both from college and high school systems. We have been granted permission and are including 19 famous textbooks; over 3,500 selected titles from "The American Journal of Physics," "The Physics Teacher," and "Physics Today;" and many other publications ranging from 30-300 pages each.

Our database works on both Macintosh and Windows computers. The same disc will work in either machine. Graphics and text from the selected material can be viewed in separate windows simultaneously. Full text simple and compound searches for words, concepts, strings of words, and names are possible and necessary with a database such as ours. Currently we have the equivalent of over 30, 000 pages of text and 22,000 separate graphics files .

If you would like to see more about the Physics InfoMall, including a typical screen view, and the publication listing, click on one of those topics. Kansas State's Physics Education Research Group also has information on the web about the Infomall, and The Learning Team sells it.