The floor is lava!

Check out this guy playing 'the floor is lava' on hard mode (much like our curriculum, this link works best in Mozilla Firefox). Notice the fire flare up from his foot at the end, this is a VERY unsafe practice.

He's lucky not to be knee-deep in lava

And this guy isn't even trying!

That might not be what you picture when you hear 'lava,' but it doesn't always explode violently - there are places where it just oozes out of the ground like this, especially in active regions like Hawaii. Hawaii is unique because the island chain is the result of the Pacific plate moving over a hotspot.

There are a number of tendencies in the picture above, most notably in the size of the different islands; they are the shortest at each end for different reasons. Lo'ihi on the far right side is an active volcano, still growing - as are Mauna Loa and Kilauea; the volcanoes to the left of those are all dormant now, being slowly eroded by the ocean.

After Ni'ihau, the rest of the former volcanoes have been eroded under the ocean's surface and are now called "seamounts" - underwater mountains that do not break the surface, where they would be islands. Here's what the islands look like from above:

So the plate must be moving from left to right (and slightly upwards) in this picture, with the hotspot currently under the biggest island, Hawai'i, which contains Mauna Loa, and older volcanoes to the left and above