LAPTAG-A Physics Outreach Program at UCLA
Walter Gekelman · APS April Meeting Abstracts · 2003
ing sponsored by the AAPT on encouraging the formation of alliances between universities and high schools. I went to the meeting under the assumption that it would lead nowhere and give me a perpetual right to gripe. There were several presentations about alliances (mostly involving several high schools and not universities), but what struck me was the great number of high school teachers present who were very interested in their craft: teaching. It was obvious that those present were dedicated and loved their work. In the afternoon we broke into groups based on physical proximity of schools and the group I was in decided to form an alliance which exists to this day. We called it LAPTAG (Los Angeles Physics Teachers Alliance Group). At the outset most of our activities consisted of going on tours of many fascinating laboratories at UCLA and then expanding this with tours at USC, JPL, General Atomics fusion laboratory, and the Mount Wilson observatory. We also met on Saturdays and discussed education reform and classroom demonstrations. About ten other alliances formed the day of the meeting and we are the only one that survived. I believe the reason for this is the introduction of projects to our venue. We used one of the computers in my plasma physics laboratory as a web server