A Lorenz attractor comes from a system of three differential equations created to model convection in the atmosphere, and frequently used to show the sensitivity of a chaotic system to initial conditions. For another chaotic system, invite your kids to help design the pancakes.

The Mandelbrot Set, which is one of the tastiest fractals, is the collection of points c on the complex plane which allow the iterated transformation z = z²; + c to remain within a given threshold. I've always been awestruck by the infinite complexity that springs from that simple equation.

This fractal, like many others, is fun to doodle at faculty meetings. Here, each triple of touching squares encloses a right triangle in a traditional visualization of the Pythagorean Theorem.

A Sierpinski triangle is a fractal, a structure that displays self-similarity at various scales. This fractal is created by recursively removing triangular pieces from the structure indefinitely - of course, the pancake isn't very hearty if you really do this, but you get the idea.