Coach P at the Science Fair...
No, no performance enhancing drugs here (outside of Valentine's chocolates!)...but I am going into Megan's elementary school next week for science fair night. They have asked a few parents with jobs that have some scientific component to show up.
I am all in, but trying to think of what to come up with. I could talk aerodynamics (bike / helmet / water bottles) and put up some wind tunnel videos on my laptop....but that's not very interactive.
Any thoughts from the peanut gallery??? 
Thanks!
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Teach them something which they can use without lots of money. A pair of shoes is all they need for speed work and they can use the information regardless if they play soccer, baseball and hopefully they won't need it but running from the school bully...
Bike wheels and angular momentum!
How do you balance on a bike? Angular momentum of the wheel! (You can decide how detailed you want to get with that...)
Give a kid a wheel to hold by the axle and tell him/her to bend it around like s/he is steering. No big deal. Now spin the wheel and do it again and the kid has a great deal harder time "turning" the wheel because of the angular momentum you gave it.
Secondary example = frisbee. "shot put" a frisbee vs throwing it with some spin.
(Tertiary adults-only example = spiral grooves in gun barrels....)
Now if they were in high school, you could give a great math/statistics lesson on predicting how fast people can go at one distance by how fast they go at another distance....but no way is that any good for 7 year olds (or whatever).
Science is observation and experimentation. Your goal is to demonstrate how even athletes can use science to help themselves improve. Reflect on the fact we often say about our training, "Each of us is an experiment where n=1." Also, this needs to be VERY SIMPLE and EYE CATCHING.
I suggest: wear an HR monitor strap which you have hooked up somehow (maybe an ANT+ USB stick) to your computer so you can show the number on the screen. You'll want to take another strap, and an HR watch with you, so they can see its not magic, and you don't have to undress in front of them. Talk a bit about how important the heart is to our body's functioning (short simple biology lesson), and how athlete's use HR to tell them how hard they are working. Show your HR at "rest", then after 30 seconds of, say, jumping jacks or something, so they can see it change. Then do a riff on a very simple hypothesis >> experiment >> measure >> conclusion that an athlete might use HR for. And end with tieing that in to how it might make for a better, say, olympic contender in the mile.
Standing up, high gear, low cadence on the uphill and then putters out on the downhill. Uses way too much energy to get from point A to B.
Sitting down, low gear, high cadence on the uphill and then pushes downhill and flies. Uses less energy to get from point A to B in less time.
Maybe have a stationary bike so they can feel the difference themselves.
Or a 20 min FTP session!!
I like William's suggestions. Anything to encourage kids to ride.
What you offer that is supposedly "information based" is actually human-performance training, and there is a lot more to this than aerodynamics.
As a self-recognized expert in elementary-school science fairs, I see it clearly:
What does it mean to train? What's the goal? How is it measured? How does the measurement relate to the goal?
Start with the basics:
initial-measurement
stimulus
after-the-fact-measurement
VDOT training, power training - EXCELLENT examples that the kids will totally relate to!
What types of decisions do you make based on your data?
Then let's get fancier - do you have an experimental group and a control group?
Not explicitly managed - how does that impact the reliability of your results?
And yet - you could tease out experimental vs. control groups.
Case in point - 14-week vs. 20-week OS - why did you change it up?
Objective / Goal
Measurable attribute (aka experimental condition - e.g. dropout percentage)
Hypothesis (if we shorten the OS to 14 weeks and build in a transition we will keep people engaged...)
Run-through (not truly an experiment, but close enough?)
Results (How many people made it through 20-weeks? How many people made it through 14 weeks)
Conclusion - you made a change in the program - why? Did the program change work or not work?
How do you know?
Could you be wrong?
Why?
How do you know how sure you should really be?
What does real human-performance research look like?
To make it really engaging to the kids, talk to them about their bodies and how their bodies would respond to training.
How far can you run full-tilt?
If you ran as fast as you could for that distance five days a week for a month, what do you think would happen? Point out that they now have an experimental condition!
How would you measure that? Point out that they now have an experimental variable.
What would you NOT change? Point out that they are talking about experimental constants.
If they say they would get faster, ask if they would get faster watching TV for a month?
When they say, "no", ask how they know? How sure are they?
There is so much here to work with, and you can relate it to the kids themselves, and teach them how science allows us to learn things we didn't know.
How old is Megan, and is there a chance this would be really engaging to her??
Hope this is useful - post back if you want more ideas!
If you do bring the tri-bike, you can talk about lots of stuff.
Angular momentum is good and I'd also add talking mechanical advantage through gearing. The kids have probably all have ridden a bike before and understand the basics of being able to pedal easier in the big ring in the back... then bust out the science!
Bonus: there is math, and it's not too complicated, behind how the gear ratios change how hard you need to work. Teachers love math.
Extra bonus: a Photoshop where you replace the cyclist with a pic of an engine and tie it all into car and truck gearing.
Heart rate is a concept very few of them even know about, though! That could be fun, especially if you have multiple HR straps/monitors. You have to let THEM put the thing on and do the jumping jacks or whatever.
Kids know they get out of breath, but very few of them will know anything about heart rates and how they change when sleeping/walking/exercising.
Replace the fluid part of your trainer with a generator hooked up to a few100W light bulbs so that when you pedal the bike, they light up - obviously more brightly the faster/harder you pedal. Let a few of them hop on the bike, or even 'pedal' it by hand - to show them the relationship between how HARD it is to actually generate something like 100W, and then to SUSTAIN it for an hour. Then remind them that all that energy is WASTED when they don't turn out the light in the bathroom behind them.
The parents will LOVE you for it. And trust me - kids will love it too because it involves lights and making them brighter.
Only problem is getting that part about hooking up your bike to a generator. You might need to find a local MacGyver for that.
If all else fails, I'd go with bringing in the bike so they could at least see on the PM how much power they are generating when turning the pedal by hand (since they likely wouldn't fit on the thing anyway - even if you took off the clipless pedals and replaced with standard ones and they stood up on them, they might not clear the top tube), and then correlate that with how many light bulbs it'll power, and for how long. It's interactive because they can see how much effort 100W is, and it's educational because it'll show them just how much effort it takes to power a 100W bulb will use over the course of an hour. And.. their parents will still thank you for it
If you could pull off Ryan's lightbulb idea, I bet that would be a winner with the kids!
Fortunately, teeth and bones are made of different stuff. :-)