When Mike Davis took to the podium toward the end of a two-hour-long City Colleges Board meeting recently, the room snapped to attention.

Davis, wearing a pale blue lab coat with writing all over it, opened a book that started shooting flames from its pages.

He drew surprised reactions when he ignited a small pile of white powder with a flash of a burst of smoke, leaving a $50 bill underneath unscathed.

Davis, a science professor at Harold Washington College, has been doing science demonstrations for school groups for years. Working with Chicago Public Schools, he developed after-school programs to get middle school students interested in science. He brings the same flair to a WYCC television show, City Science. And he's looking to turn the show into a national program.

“The main thing that we’re trying to show is that, you’re going to use everything you learn, one way or another. These things show up in the city,” Davis says.

His passion is showing people how science relates to everyday life and doesn’t just happen in a laboratory.

“Middle school is sort of this magical make-or-break time for science. Up until fifth grade, everyone seems to love it,” Davis says. “In high school, people take what they’re required and very little else.”

Davis will start filming six more episodes of City Science this summer. The first seven were on topics like sailing, sewage and theatrical lighting and rigging. Each half-hour episode starts with a basic question – for example, what do trash and the region’s water supply have to do with each other?

Davis then seeks out experts to explain the science at work. He ends with a science demonstration viewers can do at home, such as making slime out of glue, borax and water.

Davis got his start in television a few years ago when he produced short television segments for a different show on simple science demonstrations. Since 2000, he had been touring schools, birthday parties and events in the city doing demonstrations with liquid nitrogen, exploding powders and color-changing liquids.

“I was doing the shows and getting a lot of attention for it,” Davis says.

He still does some of those shows today, thanks to funding from Science Chicago, a Museum of Science and Industry project that encourages kids to pursue careers in the field. 

“His strength is the ability to think about what might be interesting or cool for a young person to see to get them engaged in science or engineering, and then think about a way to deliver that in a program,” says Rabiah Mayas, the science director at Science Chicago.

Davis is getting ready to film six more episodes of City Science this summer. They’ll explore topics like the science of music and sound, how baseballs and bowling balls curve, and look for unusual life in the lake and nearby forest preserves – including flying squirrels.

“We do have some rather exotic things that you would not expect to see,” Davis says.

By next year, with a full 13-episode season in hand, Davis wants to pitch the series to PBS stations across the country.

While that could bring in new revenue for the City Colleges and WYCC, Davis has no idea how much.

Often, he says, PBS stations will trade shows with one another, rather than paying for the rights to air a program.

The episodes may also need to be slightly reworked so that they aren’t quite so Chicago-centric.

“The City Colleges doesn’t have much experience producing shows with broad appeal,” Davis says.

People like Mayas agree that a science-based television show like Bill Nye the Science Guy, a popular series in the 1990s, has a lot of potential.

“I grew up with ‘3-2-1 Contact’ and … all of those shows that have kind of fallen into syndication, so I think as a goal it’s a really great one,” Mayas says.

Davis is careful to point out that while people say he sometimes looks like Bill Nye because of the lab coat, the two shows are very different.

“We tend to take our time in places and we go a little more in-depth on the science,” Davis says.