You may have heard that the Pirelli Foundation just gave an international award to Chemistry Comes Alive!, a collection of about 2,000 videos of chemistry experiments that is part of the ChemEdDL Pathways project. I recently showed the site to another eminent panel of judges — namely, several teen-aged boys — and based on the time they spent watching the videos and the noises they made while watching them, I’m giving the site another award called “It Blowed Up Good.” Normally this award is reserved for action movies and obscure cable TV shows, but the “Alive!” site accomplishes the rarest of feats: it informs while it explodes.

Consider “Nitrogen Triiodide Detonation,” a riveting 22-second sequence excerpted in the screen shots above. A ring stand is set up with two rings, each holding a filter paper spread with nitrogen triiodide. The bottom filter paper is touched with a feather, causing an explosion that detonates the other sample of nitrogen triiodide. We are asked to provide evidence that a chemical reaction has taken place, and to characterize it as either combination, decomposition, exchange, or acid-base. But the educational component merely increased the teen-agers’ interest because it meant showing the explosion three times, with the third time in slow motion.

Many other educational explosions, fires, and mayhem are depicted on the site, including “Ice Bomb,” “Dust Explosion,” “Thermite Reaction,” and “Mercury Beating Heart.” Why can’t school be this fun all day?