In January 2003, a team of university researchers received National Science Foundation funding to create the web-based TeachEngineering.org digital library collection - populated with searchable, standards-based K-12 curricula for use by science teachers and engineering faculty to teach engineering in K-12 settings.

The idea was to build upon the extensive K-12 engineering curriculum already developed by four universities with National Science Foundation's GK-12 program funding, and merge the curricula from these individual sites into a unified and useful collection of free and accessible resources.

Engineering faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, and K-12 teachers were key participants in this endeavor. Each institution had local school district partners engaged to promote engineering as a vehicle for math and science integration as they developed and classroom tested the curricular materials. The resulting lessons and activities relate to everyday encounters in the lives of youngsters, thus providing an engineering context for student learning.

Faculty and students in the College of Business at Oregon State University designed and developed the system architecture and search engine. The architecture, document collection and metadata formulation are based on established NSDL digital library protocols.

Concurrently, the partners standardized the initial curricular contents, converting a variety of K-12 engineering curricula into searchable, standards-based documents with a common look and feel. Activities take an "engineering on a shoestring" approach, using low-cost, readily available materials. Collections curricula meet explicit quality criteria and are aligned with state or national science, mathematics and technology educational standards.

The team populated the collection with classroom-tested contents over several years. The units, lessons and activities introduce engineering to K-12 students, serving as integrators of science and mathematics concepts. The collection also provides a portal to several "living labs" - providing curricula for classroom use of online real-world data on wind, water and transportation. Every year, the project team reaches out to end-users by conducting teacher and faculty workshops on how to use the collection to teach engineering to youngsters. The American Society for Engineering Education is a valuable partner, leading the nationwide dissemination and promotion of the collection.

National Science Foundation funding received in November 2005 provided the means to expand TeachEngineering capabilities to become the K-12 component of NSDL's Engineering Pathway. As part of this work, in October 2008, the team released a breakthrough version in which all 700+ curricular items are aligned to the current K-12 math and science educational standards of all 50 states and many national standards. This unprecedented multi-state alignment required the availability of all K-12 science and math standards in electronic form and more than a year of nightly "mining" of CNLP's CAT (Curriculum Alignment Tool) and SAT (Standard Alignment Tool), and JES & Co.'s ASN (Achievement Standards Network) data, resulting in 24 million alignments. Our thanks go to our NSDL collaborators: Achievement Standards Network (JES & Co.) and the Center for Natural Language Processing (Syracuse University). With this new version, TeachEngineering is able to support authors who contribute new curricular content that meets educational standards from any state, as well as teachers from all states searching for curriculum that aligns to their state's standards. The team continues to enhance many user features of the system, and all the original partners continue to grow and evolve the project through expansion of the collection.