YouTuber Mark Rober visited a colleague’s home and asked his daughter what she was learning in science. She showed him an old Bill Nye video and a worksheet that looked like it had been photocopied a thousand times. Rober is giving schools the Class CrunchLabs science curriculum for free and for good, even though he says it cost more than $60 million to produce. The classroom thus becomes another channel for his content.
He already has channels outside school. On YouTube he has more than eighty million subscribers. Netflix, which is building its children’s library on YouTube creators, is streaming his earlier episodes and preparing a competition show with him. Samsung TV Plus has launched Mark Rober TV, his first own FAST channel. The website of Rober’s foundation calculates that if CrunchLabs were a school district, it would be larger than all public and private schools in America combined.
The site Net Influencer sees the curriculum as the next step in syndicating Rober’s content, this time into schools, where CrunchLabs gains “a foothold in classrooms that its Netflix and Samsung deals do not reach.”
Free videos for classrooms were offered to Czech teachers earlier by the public broadcaster Czech Television. It launched the ČT edu website, open without registration, in April 2020 with more than three thousand short videos, which it selected from its archive with fifty teachers according to the framework educational programmes. The framework programme for primary education has since been revised, and schools may introduce the new version voluntarily from September 2025. It will become mandatory in September 2028, a year later than planned, and the delay is already reflected in the European Commission’s overview.
Rober is filming videos for Class CrunchLabs as a volunteer
Rober is to film for the curriculum as a volunteer for the next four and a half years, one week every month. By making it free, he wants to ease the lessons’ path into classrooms. “Truthfully, I want to remove any friction to getting this adopted as widely as possible. That's partly why it's free.” As early as November 2025 he pointed out that teachers pay out of their own pockets for weak teaching materials. The programme for pupils from third to eighth grade was developed with the American science teachers’ association NSTA.
The first two courses, Carnival of Collisions and Mission Maglev, were released on YouTube in September 2026 and are aimed at sixth to eighth grade. The lessons are led by Rober, “Science Bob” Pflugfelder, guests and students. Each unit comes with hands-on activities, a teacher’s guide and tests. The whole programme is meant to offer more than a thousand videos in 34 languages. For now, a thousand videos is only a target.
The videos for classrooms are paid for by the foundation, the company and YouTube
The curriculum is run by the non-profit CrunchLabs.org Foundation. The foundation was established in October 2025 with a $7.2 million grant from an anonymous donor and with an initial contribution from the company CrunchLabs. The company sells families its Build Box kit on subscription for $32.95 a month. This February, content director Scott Lewers listed education, together with experiences, among the new ventures of a company that he says is driven by entertaining content. According to the site Gadgetbond, CrunchLabs boxes are for families who can afford them, while Class CrunchLabs brings the same teaching to public schools.
On 6 October 2026, YouTube joined the payers. Together with Google.org, it is giving Class CrunchLabs a $2.5 million grant for new teaching materials, further translations, research and filming. The money is also meant to keep the teaching free, and YouTube is giving Rober the platform through which the curriculum is to reach teachers and pupils. Back in June, YouTube described its partnership with Rober as part of an effort to become a go-to source of quality academic content. YouTube wants to get into classrooms too.
Into them Rober brings newly filmed lessons aligned with school standards, along with experiments that must not cost a single dollar. A school builds them from things it finds in the bin or already has. To the old Bill Nye video that his colleague’s daughter showed him, Rober responds with a video of his own.
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