YouTube is partnering with engineer and creator Mark Rober to bring Class CrunchLabs, a free, standards-aligned science curriculum for grades 3 through 8, into classrooms starting with the 2026 back-to-school season. The platform announced the initiative in a blog post, framing it as part of its broader push to become a primary destination for academic content.

The curriculum is developed in partnership with the National Science Teaching Association and will include hundreds of hands-on challenges alongside more than 1,000 videos. All video content will be available in 34 languages on a new dedicated “Class CrunchLabs” YouTube channel. YouTube said the program is designed to spark student curiosity, build teacher confidence, and make science feel approachable.

The announcement formalizes an education initiative Crunch Labs had already begun building. At the Kidscreen Summit in February, Chief Content Officer Scott Lewers described the effort, then in pilot with two units under development, as personally funded by Rober through his foundation, with a four-year content commitment tied to a fall 2026 rollout. “He’s financing this through his foundation,” Lewers said at the time. “This is a huge commitment to achieve this goal of getting all this content and these different disciplines out there.” 

The YouTube and NSTA partnership now announced puts a platform and a curriculum body behind that previously self-funded push, and the back-to-school 2026 timeline matches what Lewers laid out months earlier.

Part of a Broader Media Operation

Rober, a former NASA and Apple engineer, built his YouTube channel to nearly 80 million subscribers after staying at his day job until he neared 10 million. The company organizes its business around the three E’s: entertainment, experience, and education, with the classroom curriculum sitting alongside subscription box products as one of Crunch Labs’ newer ventures rather than its core video output.

That entertainment arm already spans multiple platforms beyond YouTube, including Netflix library drops of past videos and a 24-hour FAST channel on Samsung, all built from a deliberately low-frequency production model of roughly 10 to 11 flagship YouTube videos a year. The education program, now getting a YouTube and NSTA partnership, represents a further extension of that syndication strategy into curriculum distribution rather than entertainment libraries, giving Crunch Labs a foothold in classrooms that its Netflix and Samsung deals do not reach.

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