YouTube can either be your best friend or a time-sucking enemy in disguise. YouTube shows whatever content it thinks you’ll be most interested in and curates suggestions around your watch history. If you find your feed is filled with Family Guy clips that zoom in every 15 seconds to avoid copyright bans or other mind-dulling content, you might want to switch your watch history up. You can easily learn about every topic under the sun on YouTube, and here are 8 of the best educational YouTube channels to do it with.
These channels put forth educational content in an interesting and easy-to-digest manner. They’re generally family-friendly if you’re trying to find something to watch with the kids, but they’re entertaining enough for adults too. You’re not going to become a rocket scientist by binge-watching these channels, but you very well will come out of it with a piece of knowledge you didn’t have before.
Veritasium
Derek Muller has been making educational videos on YouTube as Veritasium for so long that his hair has started turning grey. His videos tend to revolve around one main central idea, and he often interviews experts on the subject matter. His most popular video revolves around answering the question of why there are 96,000,000 shade balls floating on the surface of a reservoir. Besides that, he has also held the world’s roundest object, played with aerogel, and sat in anechoic chambers for extended periods of time.
Smarter Every Day
Destin Sandlin at Smarter Every Day is one of the most prolific science and education YouTubers. Every video revolves around exploring a facet of science or his own ingenious creations, like a baseball bat that swings at 250+ miles per hour. His videos are extremely easy to watch and offer interesting perspectives on things all around us, like grain bins, bicycles, and Prince Rupert’s Drops. His series where he boards a US submarine and shows us the (non-classified) inner workings is an amazing series that you’ll find yourself watching for hours.
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
Kurzgesagt is a great channel for those that enjoy high-quality animations alongside their stream of educational knowledge. With over 20,000,000 subscribers, they’ve certainly got quite the following—and for good reason. They put a ton of effort into their videos and ensure that all of their claims or facts are backed by research. Their most popular videos include a discussion on the immune system, the Fermi Paradox, and a deep-sea nuke.
Numberphile
Fans of math, numbers, and other interesting concepts should immediately subscribe to Numberphile. Brady Haran serves as the videographer and producer. There are a variety of highly qualified speakers in each video, like Hannah Fry, Matt Parker, and famed mathematician Terence Tao. Their most popular videos include discussing the problem from the famed film Good Will Hunting, problems with the number zero, and the WWII Nazi Enigma machine. If you’re interested in computers, they have a separate channel titled Computerphile you might want to take a look at.
Mark Rober
Arguably the most popular education and science YouTuber, Mark Rober has some of the best videos out there. Not all of it is even about education; some of it is just downright entertainment. You’ve probably seen his videos where he makes bait packages for porch thieves that spray fart spray and make police siren noises, but he has lots of other videos covering topics you won’t find on other channels. He created a pool out of jello, goes over carnival scams, and creates videos highlighting groundbreaking technology, like a packet that purifies water and drones that automatically deliver medical supplies across Rwanda.
Stuff Made Here
Stuff Made Here is an engineering and science channel that has quickly grown into one of the more popular science channels on YouTube. His inventions are fairly wacky and not exactly useful, but they’re a great testament to engineering and often showcase creative problem-solving. His most popular video is a basketball hoop that automatically catches the ball, an automatic pool stick, and a bat that uses .50 caliber blanks to hit out-of-the-park home runs.
Vsauce
Vsauce has been on YouTube since the late 2000s and has routinely posted quality educational videos. Known for jumping from one point to another based on some sort of thin relation, Vsauce is hosted by Michael Stevens, who serves to answer every random thought or question you might have. His 3rd most popular video answers the lifelong question of “What if everyone jumped at the same time?” If you enjoy Vsauce, you might want to check out other channels in the Vsauce network, like Vsauce2 and Vsauce3, hosted by other creative and bright individuals.
Tom Scott
Tom Scott has 708 videos of highly educational content from places you didn’t even know existed. He’s posted a video every week for almost 10 years, which is quite an impressive feat, and shows just how dedicated and varied his content is. Some of his most popular videos include sending garlic bread to space and eating it, a musical road in California that sounds terrible, and why the US Army electrifies a certain body of water outside of Chicago.
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