Mark Rober, a NASA engineer turned YouTube sensation with over 75 million subscribers, has spent his internet career making creative, silly, engaging science experiments for viewers, many of them young people.
His company, CrunchLabs, sells Build Boxes and Creative Kits to bring the fun home to kids. But underneath videos of swimming pools filled with Jell-O and Goalie Robots that can beat Cristiano Renaldo through the power of physics, Rober argues he’s introducing kids to real science.
“For the last 15 years, once a month, I’ve uploaded a free science or engineering video to YouTube,” Rober said in a TED Talk at TED 2026 in Vancouver, British Columbia earlier this week.
“And 16 billion views later, what I’ve learned is, I can’t teach you if I don’t have your attention. But if I can get your attention with something remarkable, well, now I have something to attach the learning to.”
He calls this method “hiding the vegetables,” by introducing “kids that grew up on YouTube and TikTok” to science, technology, engineering, and math, in fun, creative ways.
“It’s really boring if you make a video about the scientific method, but what’s not boring is if you make a video about a 15-ton Jell-O pool you can actually bellyflop onto. And in the process, I’mma sneak in all six steps of the scientific method.”
He noted he was inspired by his high school statistics teacher, Mr. Malloy, who used statistics lessons to predict a rival school soccer team’s penalty kicks.
“He was so good at attaching emotions to learning. He was so good at hiding the vegetables,” Rober said. “This is why I love teachers; I think they have the most important job on the planet.”
Rober said his dream job is ultimately to be a middle school science teacher, but in the meantime, he wants to make it easier for teachers to implement fun, engaging lessons in STEM, instead of forcing them to spend their own money on materials.
As Rober’s CrunchLabs website shares, he doesn’t think there’s a STEM talent shortage, but an “inspiration shortage.”
And with the size of his reach — if CrunchLabs were a school district, the website reads, “we would be larger than every public and private school in America combined” — Rober wants to change that.
On the TED stage, he announced something he’s been working on for about two and a half years with a team of science teachers across the country: Class CrunchLabs, an online STEM curriculum program tailored to grades 3-8.
“The reason we’re doing this is because it breaks my heart when I see teachers who get paid salaries that as a society we should be ashamed of, spending their own money on resources that totally suck.”
Class CrunchLabs “has everything they need,” Rober said.
This includes “banger videos kids are going to beg to re-watch that explain the science,” for example.
“It’s got ready-to-teach slide decks that are super clean and easy to use. It’s got this really thought-out, curated science demos that kids get to viscerally react to the science that teachers can make with stuff they just have lying around the classroom,” he explained.
Rober said the courses “exceed all the state science standards,” as well.
“The teacher becomes the hero as they engage the students in real science and engineering they actually care about,” he said. “It’s exactly what science class was meant to be: Super frickin’ fun.”
In total, Rober and CrunchLabs invested about $60 million in building this curriculum, he said. According to the CrunchLabs.org Foundation website, the nonprofit arm of Rober’s work launched with “a generous $7.2 million anonymous gift,” along with seed funding from CrunchLabs.
But for teachers, it will be completely free.
Rober said that of the teachers who taught pilot lessons to students, 95% said they wanted Class CrunchLabs to be their full science curriculum.
“The idea is you combine incredible teachers with incredible resources to get explosive output,” Rober said. “To all those teachers out there in the trenches, I want you to know: Reinforcements are on the way.”
The first round of Class CrunchLabs units are now available online.
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Header image by Ryan Lash / TED
