I’m sure there are a lot of teachers who find a way to enthuse their students to love science, but it’s not something that I personally experienced when I was in school.”

It’s apparently not something that many among YouTube vlogger Charlie McDonnell’s audience have experienced either. And that audience is huge.

McDonnell, 26, was the first vlogger in the UK to reach 1 million subscribers on YouTube - a number that has now more than doubled - and the vast majority of his audience are secondary school pupils.

Why would he think they have a poor experience of science? Well, because they tell him that’s the case.

After focusing his vlogs on topics such as “The Hipster Inside Me” and “Magic Mars Bars”, he turned to science. His “Fun Science” YouTube series was an attempt, he says, to stimulate students who weren’t interested in the subject. And it became very popular, very quickly.

Take a look around his YouTube channel and the responses clearly support his view that he is providing something teenagers think they are missing. The comments sections are full of students begging him to be their science teacher; others see him as solely responsible for their A* in biology.

“I get a lot of feedback from students who don’t like science, and find it boring at school,” McDonnell says.

Such was the success of the series that a book deal was put on the table and this year Fun Science: a guide to life, the universe and why science is so awesome appeared in bookshops.

‘I get a lot of feedback from students who find science boring at school’

Before science teachers begin their defence, McDonnell is keen to stress that he does not consider himself a science teacher. He is also eager to state that he is not saying that all pupils find science boring in school.

However, the success of his videos and the comments below them do demonstrate to him that there are teenagers out there who were not enthused in the classroom but in whom a fire has now been lit for science after watching his vlogs.

Quite why his approach works for those students is worth some consideration, particularly taking into account the continuing efforts to boost engagement with science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) subjects.

Some of what McDonnell does is not easily replicated in the classroom. His philosophy is based on how he came to engage with science as an adult through Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane’s Cosmos television series and science-related podcasts.

“I don’t know if it was different for the other pupils in my class; maybe they got [science] and I didn’t. But for me the enthusiasm came from teaching myself,” he explains. “[In schools], you have a specific set of things that you are supposed to be figuring out and remembering. But when I left school I could focus on the things that really interested me, and [it became] fun.”

Adopting such a “free” learning approach to science in schools is obviously very difficult when you have 30 teenagers boxed in a small room, all of whom you have to guide towards a very specific grade by teaching very specific content. It’s even harder when you have tiers of accountability ensuring that this happens.

But McDonnell says that he would not expect teachers to adopt such an approach. Rather, he advises them to simply point students in the right direction so they can begin a voyage of self-discovery that will then pay dividends back in the lessons.

“Maybe part of school should be saying, ‘Maybe you don’t find this interesting right now, but I would recommend looking at these things in your own time because there’s a lot of really cool stuff out there.’ You should be able to say, ‘Well, no, this doesn’t fit in the curriculum, but it’s really cool and maybe it will fill you with some love and enthusiasm for this thing and it could make everything else easier to digest’.”

According to some teachers, though, certain videos that McDonnell has produced do have a place in the classroom - as an additional resource. One vlog in particular, “Reproduction” , has had more than 1 million views, and the number of comments from both students and teachers are in the thousands.

One teacher wrote: “Definitely showing this to my Year 9 class. You make it light-hearted and ease the awkwardness.”

Other videos have been picked up by teachers as revision aids.

“I get a lot of comments from people who use my videos for revision, and whose teachers show my videos in classes,” McDonnell explains.

He’s more than happy for the videos to be used as a resource in this way - not as the main source of information but as a hook to get teens interested. He thinks that being an outside voice, one that many teens see as “cool”, can have an impact on how young people view the subject.

“The problem is that as soon as you’re in school and your teachers are trying to communicate something to you as ‘cool’, it instantly becomes uncool,” he says. “If there are science vloggers out there who the students admire, teachers should point towards them. They should say, ‘Look how much this cool person cares about science.’ Then the subject becomes cool.”

‘As soon as your teachers try to communicate something as “cool”, it becomes uncool’

Yet, McDonnell says, it is not just his status as a vlogger or his topic choices that are turning these teenagers towards science. It is also the time he takes to find an angle that will appeal to his audience on everything he covers - taking it down to the personal level and presenting it in an entertaining way. Contrary to what many teachers might think, the latter does not mean rolling out huge experiments, he says.

“One of the things I veer away from is actual ‘bang’ experiments because I think sometimes it almost feels like we’re looking at something that will explode to distract from the ‘boring’ science instead of focusing on the science itself and making that the cool thing. The challenge is [things like] rocks. Like, how do I make rocks fun? But I think I managed to find a lot of stuff in there [that does make it fun].”

The majority of teachers will say that they attempt to do this, too, but McDonnell has the gift of time that science teachers often do not have. With a mounting workload, an ever-increasing curriculum and a struggle to actually recruit staff, it’s no surprise that science teachers in the UK are among some of the unhappiest in the world.

For those who are passionate about instilling a love of science in their pupils, it can be a really difficult job to bring that to the fore. So rather than lessons for teachers in teaching science, McDonnell should instead be a reminder to government that if they want to boost science participation, then science teachers need more support, time and freedom.

One thing McDonnell is sure of is that teachers should not aspire to be more like science vloggers like him.

But, actually, for any jaded science teachers out there, watching the sheer joy with which McDonnell talks about science may be a useful reminder to reconnect with their own reasons for teaching the subject and a prompt to try and demonstrate that passion to the students. His joy is infectious.

“In the Fun Science book, I’m talking about the universe and the first thing that I lay out is the fact that the universe feels like this big foreign thing out there in space - and we don’t necessarily think of us or our planet being very much a part of it,” he says.

“We’re made of the exact same stuff you’ll find anywhere else in the universe, and I pick up one of my favourite quotes from one of my favourite science communicators, Carl Sagan, which is, ‘We are a way for the universe to know itself’, which really brings it home and makes it much more personal.

“I think that’s really important to figure out ways to relate [science] to people’s lives, which makes it feel less ‘other’, less like something out there in the world and more like something that is really a part of you. Figuring out ways to make it more personal is what I try to do.”