Mark Rober’s Class Crunchlabs gets an ‘A’ with $2.5 million grant from YouTube and Google.org

The school has only just begun, but YouTube is ensuring that Mark Rober‘s class will remain in session for the long term. Together with Google.org — the charitable arm of its parent company — YouTube is delivering $2.5 million of grant funding to Class CrunchLabs, an educational channel Rober produces and hosts.

Last year, Rober announced that he would build a science curriculum and give it away for free to any teacher who wants to use it. The YouTube-famous engineer, who counts 83.6 million subscribers on his primary channel, built his curriculum as an extension of his science kit brand CrunchLabs.

In the following months, the curriculum now known as Class CrunchLabs began to take shape. Rober committed $55 million to the project and locked in YouTube as a key distribution partner. He planned to prepare lessons for students between the third and eighth grades, with videos available across 34 different langauges. To ensure that Class CrunchLabs would meet educational standards, Rober consulted with the National Science Teaching Association (NSTA).

“These poor teachers, they actually pay money for content that’s not good,” Rober said at the time. “They’re paying their own money, and they don’t have much. So we’re just gonna put it out there.”

YouTube said that the Class CrunchLabs curriculum, consisting of “more than 1,000 banger videos,” would be ready for the start of the 2026-27 school year. It was able to make good on that promise. The initial Class CrunchLabs clips have covered topics like collisions

and electromagnetism. To help keep kids engaged as he teaches science to them, Rober has enlisted some creator co-stars, including the Geoguessr savant Trevor Rainbolt.

It took a lot of work to put the initial Class CrunchLabs slate together, but the second round of science lessons is already off and running. The grant money will support Rober as he translates his curriculum into additional languages, funds more research, and keeps Class CrunchLabs free of charge.

“For years, Mark Rober has been the internet’s favorite science teacher, and now he is bringing that same magic directly to classrooms,” said YouTube Global head of Youth and Learning Katie Kurtz in a statement. “At YouTube, we are incredibly proud to support Mark on this massive labor of love, providing the platform to help him scale his hands-on, standards-aligned curriculum to teachers and students everywhere.”

Robert may be YouTube’s favorite teacher, but he himself is keen on other educators. That’s why, on World Teachers’ Day, he delivered a proverbial apple: Free resources that can fit in classrooms around the world.