Tag - Ping Pong Balls

Steve is Headed Back to The Ellen DeGeneres Show

We are all excited to see Steve Spangler make his 13th appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show this week. He will be a guest on the Wednesday, February 29th Leap Day show.

Steve has been working tirelessly the past few weeks to put together some fun and explosive demonstrations to do with Ellen. We can’t tell you what he has planned, but promise it will bring out a lot of oohs and ahhs from the audience and Ellen herself. In past appearances, he has made giant Elephant’s Toothpaste, blown hundreds of ping pong balls across the stage, walked across a pool of corn starch, laid Ellen across a bed of nails and shot smoke rings across the studio. You can watch all of Steve’s appearances on SteveSpanglerScience.com.

What will he do this time? Check your local listings and tune in Wednesday to find out.

Science of Leadership – Using 2,000 Ping Pong Balls to Blast Kids to Middle School

My oldest son wanted to know if I would come to school on the last day and do a really cool science experiment. Let’s see… hmmm… a legitimate excuse to make a kaboom in front of 130 screaming 5th graders? I’m in. But as I started to think about what I would do, the teacher in me kept whispering, “Do something with the Science of Leadership.” Years ago, with the help of a great friend, Dr. Earl Reum, we created a leadership training curriculum for students called the Science of Leadership. While the curriculum was fun to teach, it was a great excuse to use cool science demos as a metaphor to teach lessons in leadership. Since I seem to have ping pong balls on the brain right now, I thought that I’d try my hand at connecting this blast of energy to these students’ journey to middle school. Here’s what happened…

If you want to learn more about the creative and innovative ways student activities advisors are teaching leadership skills, check out the National Association of Workshop Directors and visit their Facebook page. NAWD is a professional
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Ellen Show – Spangler Science Take 9 – It’s Raining Ping Pong Balls!

We’re back from the Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, California with lots of fun stories from our latest appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres Show. When I say ‘we’… I mean ‘we’ because there’s no way I could pull these segments off by myself. Jeff Brooks, Carly Reed and Lisa Brooks traveled with me and worked hard backstage and on the outside location shoot to make everything run smoothly. Unlike other talk shows, the people at the Ellen Show are used to pulling off big stunts… but even this one had everyone a little on edge because no one really knew what was going to happen to all of those ping pong balls. Watch the video…

The line-up of science demos was as follows…

• Cloud in a Bottle – a really visual way of creating a water vapor cloud instantly in a 2-liter bottle.
• The second demo was a Dust Explosion using a very fine spore called Lycopodium, a fine yellow powder derived from the spores of Lycopodium clavatum (stag’s horn club moss, running ground pine). By itself, the powder is not flammable. When the fine powder is dispersed in the air and each particle is surrounded by oxygen, it’s very flammable…and the
  

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