d0r13n

As someone who used to work at a middle school and would often "dress up" a lesson to appear one way if only to pique my students interests, it really is entertaining to me that a lot of the comments are missing the fact you're a legit physicist dressing up the wonder and awe we can find in science with "magical" terms.

I had a really cool teacher in high school who would do it constantly. My most memorable experiment of his was he talked about how he would turn soda cans into essentially hot air balloons and have them dance around the room. Talked it up for a couple of days even. When he did it, of course the can simply imploded, and then he had us do a short write up on why it didn't work.

I saw another comment where you use a cork and a glass of water to teach about surface tension. Can you share an experiment that can really wow a crowd in the 16-18 age group?

Same teacher did the same thing experiment you described! Before I had him he used to do another experiment involving flammability and surface area using a Bunsen Burner and corn starch. Due to a very large scorch mark on the ceiling he accidentally put there the previous year, he stopped doing that one with classes officially...

Unofficially it was really cool.

Thank you! I'll definitely try that plasma ball one!