When I was growing up, we had discovery channel. That sparked my intrinsic curiousity. My daughter has that intrinsic motivation as well, but only for k-pop now. She likes youtube videos and she likes when I tell her about science stuff. Maybe I can combine that by recommending her some good youtube channels.
Seconding this. PBS has a TON of YouTube channels for all kinds of interest areas. Not all are going to be geared to a middle school audience, but much like the TV stations themselves, at least you don’t have to worry as much* about the potential content as a parent (in terms of quality or appropriateness) vs random YouTube channels.
*I would say all their stuff is high school appropriate, but some of the more local/news-related stuff could be a bad fit for younger audiences depending on the kid, only because we don’t live in a world that’s child-friendly. Also channels like PBS Terra do a lot of videos about how fucked we are re: climate change (not in so many words of course) and although they do try to put an optimistic spin on it, sensitive kids might get freaked out by how bad things are (which would be an accurate response of course, so it depends on how much you’ve been trying to shelter your kid from this kind of thing I guess).