Andy Ross

Andy Ross beat out over 34 other musicians to replace original guitarist Andy Duncan when he left OK Go in 2005—right on time to appear in the American rock band's Grammy-winning video for the hit single "Here It Goes Again" in 2007. It was the second of OK Go's ingeniously choreographed videos, which, over the years, have increasingly relied on math and science—like a four-minute-long Rube Goldberg machine and a cheeky space ballet performed in zero-g. “Most rock music is used for catharsis,” says OK Go bandleader and video director Damian Kulash. “That’s true for us, too, but our songs’ videos were also being used as teacher’s aids.” They figured, Why not make it official? Last year, the musicians partnered with AnnMarie Thomas, director of the University of St. Thomas’s Playful Learning Lab, to launch the nonprofit OK Go Sandbox. This online resource for teachers, sponsored by Google, Morton Salt, and Cognizant Technology Solutions, offers STEAM-related activities and challenges based on the band’s videos, such as one revealing the math (and spreadsheets) required to slow a 4.2-second-long chain reaction to sync with “The One Moment" (a music video that’s been viewed more than 25 million times on YouTube). Their latest initiative: The Art in Space Contest, launched in conjunction with Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Cognizant that will place a student’s art experiment aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard launch vehicle, a reusable craft designed to take payloads—and eventually people—into suborbital space.