Dr Bunhead, AKA Tom Pringle, explodes with enthusiasm over young science fans

For this ‘screen age’ generation of children, so much of their exploration exists between their thumb and forefinger, their excitement confined to a small, beeping, rectangle of light.

It seems they are missing out on so much of the joy of real-world phenomena where awe and wonder are kindled, where patience and persistence are developed.

My show Dr Bunhead’s Secret Science Lab (Don’t Try this at Home) is a reaction to this. I wanted to reintroduce the pleasures of exploratory play to kids (and parents) – the real kind that goes whoosh, whizz, bang and boom. Once they’re hooked into this authentic world, momentarily unplugged from cyberland, a new world can open up to them. The focus of this show is on peering through the window of science with a child’s eye view, bringing everyday objects back to life, as they were for everyone of us at some stage in our lives.

Volunteer scientists come on stage making ‘rainbow foam fountains’ and ‘giant bogeys’. Between these DIY elements Dr Bunhead creates floating fire bubbles, the fastest chips in the world (with a potato bazooka), enough hydrogen (from a decomposing pencil sharpener) to send booms into laps of the audience and exciting memories to send kids away bursting for more.

I started teaching science nearly 30 years ago and have been Dr Bunhead for almost 20 years. Much has changed, but not children. They are still as curious, excitable, sensitive and imaginative as ever. ‘Low attention span’ is more a description of bored children rather than inability to concentrate. An engaged child will sit for hours with their head in a book, a soldering iron in their hands, as long as curiosity or passion is sparked. After years of creating large-scale, attention-grabbing science demos to excite children’s interest, I wanted more experiments children could do, especially ones their parents could enjoy alongside them.

Devising and delivering Dr Bunhead shows has allowed me to teach across all six inhabited continents. I found curiosity, humour and excitement to be a universal language. I’ve had the good fortune to meet and train hundreds of teachers, academics and science presenters to perform thousands of TV appearances around the world (I especially enjoyed Sky One’s Brainiac: Science Abuse). But my greatest joy comes from hearing parents telling me how they were turned on to science after one of my shows, many years ago, and now bring their own children along.

Ultimately, I’m still an enthusiastic teacher trying to deliver the science class of a lifetime. All the explosive science shenanigans are ploys to help open a few more minds to the joy and beauty of engaging with the science that fills our world. All we need to do is get them out from behind that little screen.

Dr Bunhead is at The Beacon, Wantage, on Saturday, 2pm. Visit beaconwantage.co.uk