I remember seeing some dull old film clip of the thermite process in action during school chemistry class. Much better would have been to see it live, in the schoolyard with a science teacher dumb enough to head back over to the reaction vessel because it hadn’t fired up quickly enough. Well, for those who missed out there’s a nice video of that very happening.
What I cannot understand is why those students and the first teacher are not wearing some kind of protective goggles and why they’re not behind a safety screen of some sort. If you did this kind of thing in a British chemistry class OFSTED would put the school on special measures quick as you could weld two chunks of metal together with aluminium (aluminum) powder and iron oxide at 2500 Celsius. D’oh!