Last night I watched a rerun of a Late Show with David Letterman, where he had kid scientists who performed 3 scientific demonstrations. Lee Marek, a science teacher from Naperville Illinois trains local students to do the demos on the show. I try to record them each year and show the demos to my students at the end of the school year. Letterman is great at interacting with the students and participating in the demos. Here is one of the segments that I found on Youtube (low quality) from the late 90’s.
I’m quite honored to be linked to, thank you very much. I apologize about the quality–it was ripped from a personal VHS copy (from back in the day before all this digital recording) to a DVD and from there to my computer and YouTube. It really was a great experience; I’m mostly sorry I don’t have a clip of the other time I went (but wasn’t on the show)–My experiment the first time involved a glass jar, a hardboiled egg, and some paper towels being lit that would, in turn, suck the egg through the mouth of the jar and into it. This is a great site, though–rock on.
That must have been an amazing experience. I know David Letterman really likes to give the students a hard time during the segment, which makes it really funny, I bet the students were treated to a good time. When I show my students the clips of past shows, they laugh but also comment that Letterman is kind of mean to the kids, which is kind of interesting. I saw an episode a couple of months back where he had kid scientists on, and this time I was able to record the show in HD on my computer, which is amazing now. When I first saw the kid scientists segment, it was back in 1994 when I first started student teaching at UC Davis, and I was able to record to VHS every couple of years when I could. Thanks for sharing your experience!