Today, there is an increased attention to the important need for the fusion community to develop effective educational programs to communicate the scope of our discipline to the general public and to students at a pre-college level. One such program was developed and tested in school classrooms which uses the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web provides a unique opportunity for developing new and powerful teaching tools at all levels of education. Pedagogical research has shown that learning is enhanced when the student is actively engaged in the learning process. Advances in WWW technology makes it possible to create fully interactive educational sites such as the Internet Plasma Physics Education Experience (IPPEX - http://ippex.pppl.gov/ippex/). This site presents relevant concepts of physics and includes an operational "virtual tokamak" and the opportunity to analyze actual data from a major fusion experiment. Students that use IPPEX say that not only does the experience enrich their learning but gives them access to resources not available in any other medium.

The development of this educational program was led by Andrew Post Zwicker. His experience will provide useful information for educational efforts that are being developed by other groups throughout the country. He will review the concept of IPPEX, using a short video, and will present current research on the effectiveness of the Internet as a teaching tool. Other ways to use Internet as a tool to teach plasma physics and fusion energy science will also be suggested.

*Work supported by US DOE Contract No. DE-AC02-76-CHO3073 and a grant from the National Science Foundation through the Networking Infrastructure in Education at the Stevens Institute of Technology.