BrainPOP New Topic Roundup: 2025
- Michelle Strom
- 4 hours ago
- 5 min read
In 2025, we added 21 new movies across BrainPOP 3-8 and BrainPOP Jr.
Moby, Tim, Annie, and friends solved mysteries in the woods using celestial mechanics, turned indoor cycling into decimal bootcamp, and proved that even corpse flowers make perfect sense once you understand adaptation.
Read on below for what’s new, what’s updated, and what's coming next.
What's new
New BrainPOP 3-8 Topics
Cassie and Moby answer questions about adding and subtracting mixed numbers. Along the way, Cassie shows how to work with like and unlike denominators, convert between mixed numbers and improper fractions, and find the least common denominator to solve real problems.
Cassie turns an over-the-top indoor cycling class into a high-energy lesson on adding and subtracting decimals, helping learn how to line up decimal points, use placeholders, regroup, and check answers with rounding. As riders pedal through hurricanes, twisters, and lava flows, she models how decimals show up in real-life situations like distance and time.
Mateo and Moby break down why the United States went to war with Britain, explaining key battles, major figures like Tecumseh and Andrew Jackson, and how the conflict reshaped borders, national identities, and Native American sovereignty.
Mateo and Moby trace the origins of written law by exploring Hammurabi’s Laws—and why societies create rules and how laws reflect shared values like justice and fairness. Learn how Hammurabi’s stone-carved code introduced ideas such as if/then rules, limits on punishment, and the principle that no one is above the law.
Nat and Moby tackle questions about whether germs “really” make us sick by unpacking what a scientific theory actually is: an explanation backed by lots of evidence. Traveling from the Black Death and “bad air” ideas to breakthroughs like clean water maps, handwashing, and Robert Koch’s experiments, they show how scientists build, test, and replace explanations when stronger evidence appears.
Tim and Moby introduce Ibn al-Haytham, a scholar whose experiments with light and vision helped create the scientific method itself, and how he used careful observation, testing, and evidence to prove that light travels from objects to our eyes, not the other way around.
Rita walks through how plants and animals compete for resources in temperate deciduous forests, as well as adapt through migration, hibernation, niches, and seasonal changes, and how trees like oaks and maples drive the ecosystem’s rhythms. With Moby dodging bees and seasons flying by, it also shows how climate change and human activity are reshaping these forests—and why their future depends on adaptation and conservation.
At a poetry open mic, Nat compares tone by reading poems “in conversation” with each other—tracking how an author’s word choice, style, and rhythm reveal feelings. She contrasts Walt Whitman's "I Hear America Singing" as warm, admiring, and celebratory with Langston Hughes’s “I, Too" as sharper and more complex, showing that noticing tone doesn’t just help you “get” a poem: it helps you understand what it’s really saying.
Langston Hughes was a central voice of the Harlem Renaissance whose poetry captured Black American life with honesty, rhythm, and pride. Nat and Moby explore how poems like “I, Too,” “Harlem,” and “Mother to Son” use tone, imagery, and jazz-inspired language—reshaping American poetry by proving that everyday speech, struggle, and music are art.
Cassie and Moby explore the traits that help plants and animals survive and reproduce in their environments. From porcupine quills and freeze-proof frogs to hypnotizing cuttlefish and corpse flowers that smell like death, the movie shows how even the weirdest features make sense in the right ecosystem.
By following a single grain of sand from a Minnesota cliff to the ocean, Nat and Moby show how forces like water, wind, ice, and gravity break down rocks, carry them across vast distances, and build landforms like beaches, deltas, dunes, and canyons. With a ruined sandcastle and plenty of geologic drama, the movie highlights how slow, steady changes can transform the planet—and sometimes people’s homes, too.
Lost in the woods (and maybe being stalked by Bigfoot), Tim and Moby use the Earth–Moon–Sun system to figure out directions and explain how people learned Earth is round—long before space travel. They break down how Earth’s rotation causes day and night and changing shadows, how the Moon reflects sunlight and orbits Earth to create phases, and how Earth’s revolution changes which constellations we see each season.
Jason Reynolds is a bestselling author whose stories center the voices, emotions, and everyday realities of kids who don’t always see themselves in books. Nat and Moby explores how Reynolds draws on his own childhood and love of music and language to write novels like Ghost and Stuntboy, and how his work proves that reading and writing belong to everyone.
Tim and Moby use a magical cooking show to explain the properties of matter and what really happens when substances change. By comparing raw and cooked eggs, rusty and shiny pans, and boiling water, they break down physical properties you can observe, chemical properties that describe how matter reacts, and the difference between physical changes and chemical changes.
New BrainPOP Jr. (K-3) Topics
Annie and Moby go bird-watching and discuss a birds’ anatomy, habitat, diet, and characteristics that both help them hunt for food and keep them safe from predators. Annie also touches on challenges that birds face from human intervention, like clearing forests or spraying chemicals on crops—as well as what we can do to protect them.
Annie and Moby turn a school fitness challenge into a math workout, figuring out total exercise time by adding one- and two-digit numbers (and two two-digit numbers). Along the way, Annie shows how to line up place values, add the ones first, then the tens—sometimes writing a zero to keep things straight.
Annie and Moby turn their classroom into a scavenger-hunt playground to find words that start with L-blends—two letters that work together at the beginning of a word, like bl, cl, fl, gl, pl, and sl—and helps viewers sound out each blend letter-by-letter and read example words (like blast, clap, flag, globe, and sleep).
Annie and Moby turn classroom cleanup into a thinking adventure by showing how sorting means grouping objects based on how they’re alike. As they organize supplies by color, type, texture, or purpose, they practice sorting into two or three groups, and show that the same objects can be sorted in different ways, depending on what you’re looking for.
Annie and Moby turn a trip to the lost and found into a word-solving adventure by exploring how -ou and -ow can make different sounds. As Annie tries out words like found, soup, cow, and yellow, she learns to slow down, test the sounds, and compare new words to ones she already knows —and shows that tricky spelling patterns get easier when you listen closely.
Annie and Moby explore the suffixes and how they change both spelling and meaning. They show how -ness turns adjectives into nouns that describe a state of being (like kindness or silliness), while -ment turns verbs into nouns that name an action or result (like movement or improvement), helping readers grow vocabulary by breaking big words into familiar, meaningful parts.
What's Updated
Our team is constantly updating our existing topics to make sure they continue to be relevant and timely for your teachable moments. Some notable updates last year include:
ADHD
Bill of Rights
Graphs
Nervous System
Photosynthesis
See the full list here, and keep this bookmarked so you’re always in the know!
What's Next
We have exciting things in store for you and your classrooms this coming year. Here's a sneak peek at some new topics you can look forward to in 2026.
Jacqueline Woodson
Dorothea Lange
Genre: Adventure Stories
Genre: Folktales
Genre: Historical Fiction
Michelle Strom is associate director, product marketing at BrainPOP. She holds a Master’s Degree in Educational Psychology, and is a former classroom teacher.