Tell us about your company and the problem it solves, or its benefit to learners or educators.
The CrunchLabs.org Foundation is the nonprofit arm of Mark Rober’s CrunchLabs, and our focus is making really good STEM learning accessible to every kid. We create full, standards-aligned curriculum and share it for free, and we design everything with one big principle in mind: spark curiosity first. If kids are genuinely excited, the learning takes care of itself.
Something we say constantly on our team is, “I can’t teach you if I don’t have your attention.” At its core, that’s the problem we’re trying to solve: real student engagement, the kind where kids lean in because they want to, not because they’re being told to.
We approach that in two main ways. First, we use YouTube-style storytelling with Mark Rober as the host to capture attention in a format kids already love. Then we pair that energy with hands-on engineering challenges created by the same toy engineers behind the CrunchLabs build-box subscription lines. It’s a unique blend: high-energy video that hooks learners, and physical challenges that turn that spark into actual doing and making.
The bigger goal is to get kids stoked to DO science, not just memorize it, and to reach them at the moment when they’re forming their STEM identity. Those early experiences matter. They influence whether a kid decides “science isn’t for me” or “wait… I think I’m good at this.” We’re working hard to tip the balance toward the latter.
Tell us about your area of expertise and how your knowledge or work enhances the field or the edtech industry.
My career path is anything but linear. I started in journalism, then moved into curriculum development and teaching, and eventually jumped into building communities, products, and business lines in edtech. It sounds scattered on paper, but each step sharpened a different muscle I rely on every day.
Journalism taught me how to ask the right questions and keep digging until I actually understand what’s going on. Teaching taught me the reality of the classroom: what it feels like to manage many different learning needs at once, and how much teachers rely on tools that are intuitive, reliable, and actually helpful. And my years in edtech taught me how to build things that work at scale without losing sight of the human beings using them.
All of that shows up in the work I do now with CrunchLabs.org. One of my personal guiding principles is to ruthlessly question everything you think you know. Don’t assume best practices are “best” just because they’re common. If you’re willing to strip a problem down to its studs, you can rebuild something that works better, not just incrementally better, but fundamentally better. At least, that’s the goal. And I think that mindset has served me well in this field, where innovation and practicality have to coexist.
Explain a problem in running an edtech company or selling products or providing service in the space that is related to the work you do?
I wouldn’t call it a “problem” as much as a design challenge: in edtech, you’re building for wildly different contexts at the same time. A student in a rural district, a student in a large urban school, and a homeschool learner might all be using the same resources, but their realities are nothing alike.
Different zip codes mean different infrastructures, classroom sizes, schedules, access to tech, teaching styles, and learning needs. Some kids have a Chromebook for every student; some classrooms have one shared device that barely holds a charge or has unreliable wifi connectivity. And then there are homeschool families who are using our curriculum independently with no classroom structure at all.
Designing for all of those realities simultaneously is complex. Our goal is to make our curriculum accessible and meaningful to every learner, not just the ones in resource-rich environments. That’s a big responsibility, and we take it seriously.
What are 3-5 specific tips to solving that problem?
1. Design for modularity
Break everything into bite-sized pieces. When a teacher has only 20 minutes before the bell rings, or when a homeschool parent needs flexibility, modular design makes curriculum usable in real life, not just in theory. Each unit in our curriculum focuses on only one or two standards at a time, which means we’re producing more units overall, but it also gives teachers the freedom to sequence and deliver content in whatever way works best for their students.
2. Start low-tech by design, then scale up
Not every classroom or household has the latest devices, and that reality has to shape the way we design. By keeping things intentionally low-tech, we remove barriers to adoption and ensure learning doesn’t depend on fancy hardware or perfect connectivity. Documents can be printed, videos can be downloaded, and slide decks work offline. Once the low-tech foundation is solid, we can scale up with more complex digital learning journeys, AI-enhanced question sequences, or platform-based experiences. But the core has to work with the basics from day one.
When people ask why materials from the Mark Rober team aren’t more high-tech, the answer is simple: we’re building for accessibility and scale first. Our goal is to reach as many brains as possible, and right now, the way to do that is to break things down to their most accessible form.
3. Prioritize everyday resources
Science class can get expensive fast. If the materials can come from a classroom closet or a kitchen drawer, teachers and families are far more likely to actually do the activity. Accessibility directly impacts participation. That’s why we design our hands-on challenges around everyday items, things kids can grab at home without a special trip to the store or an Amazon order. This approach is working: we’ve had kids building cardboard maglev trains in their living rooms because the materials were that easy to find.
4. Build in public and iterate constantly
Instead of dropping a full middle school curriculum all at once, we’re releasing beta units on a rolling basis, field-testing them, and iterating in real time. This can get messy, but the goal is to bring as many voices and perspectives into the process as quickly as possible so the final product is genuinely stronger.
This level of visibility and collaboration keeps us grounded and humble, and we learn incredible tips and tricks along the way. Just last week, a teacher in the Midwest taught us that if you cut the tops off used hand warmers, you end up with a perfect pile of recycled iron filings for teaching our unit on electric and magnetic forces. I’m not sure our Bay Area-based team would’ve discovered that on our own.
What other advice do you have for professionals working in edtech?
Build trust before you build buzz.
Education stakeholders, teachers, administrators, and parents are rightfully skeptical of edtech promises after years of overhyped solutions that underdelivered. Earn credibility by actually bringing these stakeholders into the process. Give them clear roles, real responsibilities, and room to contribute. It’s not always easy, but let them see the messy parts, too—because that’s where they can really help shape what you’re building. A little transparency and inclusion go a long way.
Be clear about what you’re actually measuring.
At CrunchLabs.org, our goal is to move the needle on STEM identity. We’re focused on whether students feel like they belong in science class and see themselves as science people. There isn’t a lot of research infrastructure around STEM identity compared to other metrics, but we believe we’re well-positioned to benchmark this and start tracking it meaningfully. If your goal is to “get kids stoked to do science” as ours is, be willing to break that down into measurable outcomes and commit to tracking them over time.
Embrace the crawl-walk-run approach, especially with emerging tech.
Yes, everyone in AI is knocking on the edtech door right now, and while we’re interested in thinking in that direction, we need to nail the fundamentals first. Build with the basics, prove the model works, and then layer in complexity. Your fancy AI-powered features won’t matter if teachers can’t reliably access your platform or if the core learning experience isn’t sound. We need to crawl before we run.