General data

Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education is a national centre of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, which is officially recognised as a university. The institute was founded in 1945 at the initiative of Dr. Homi Jehangir Bhabha. There are at present about 400 scientists in the Institute working in various disciplines grouped into three major schools: the School of Mathematics, the School of Natural Sciences and the School of Technology and Computer Science. The Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education was set up three decades ago to promote equity and excellence in science and mathematics education from primary school to undergraduate college level, and encourage the growth of scientific literacy in the country. To these ends it carries out a wide spectrum of inter-related activities, which may be viewed under three broad categories: (a) Research and Development, (b) Teacher Orientation and Science Popularisation, and (c) Olympiads and other Students' Nurture Programmes. The Centre has around 20 academic members with support from another 40 scientific and project staff.

Main activities

• The centre conducts R & D activity in science and mathematics education, including philosophy, history of science, cognitive psychology, and science technology and society studies.
• The centre develops curricular and extra-curricular material for science and mathematics education.
• It is India's nodal centre for Olympiad programmes in Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Astronomy.
• It conducts teacher orientation and science popularisation programmes.
• The centre offers PhD in science education.

Brief description of activities in the field of Open Standards & Free Software

In the area of Information Technology, the centre has expertise in developing a knowledge organisation and knowledge representation system called GNOWSYS, which is an official GNU Free Software project, and supports open standards for semantic web like OWL, XTM. It also has plans to support new emerging generic standards for knowledge representation like Common Logic. The centre produced a GNU/Linux distribution called gnoware, which is specially made for science and mathematics education. The centre is consolidating its effors in this direction in building a free information infrastructure called the gnowledge project. The centre supports the Free Software community and the GNU/Linux users group of Mumbai by providing them a forum to organise events, developer workshops, conduct training in Free Software, maintain mailing lists, web sites, etc.

International contacts & Indicators of quality and reputation

Tata Institute of Fundamental Research is a premier research institute in India, working in areas of basic sciences encompassing most fields in biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics and physics. In the same tradition its science education centre has reputation for outstanding research in the area of science and mathematics education. Its members contribute to leading international journals and participate in conferences, and are part of the peer group in science education. The centre also organises international conferences in the area.