Mark Rober is an engineer and an inventor who makes science videos for YouTube. He grew up in Brea, California, and went to Brea Olinda High School. He went to Brigham Young University and the University of Southern California, where he studied mechanical engineering.

Rober made sand act like a liquid with a process called a fluidized bed. When the right amount of air moves through the sand, it flows like a liquid, and when the air stops, it turns solid again. He could not find instructions for the sand pool he imagined, so he read industrial patents for ideas. The industrial designs he studied showed many small air holes rather than one large inlet. He tinkered with the number and spacing of the holes until his design worked. Rober turned sand into liquid after 25 attempts.

Every project Rober builds has mishaps and dead ends along the way. The builds are harder than his short build montages make them look. Rober has given a TED talk called The Super Mario Effect about learning from failure. A TED page says that when 50,000 of his subscribers, about three million at that time, took part in a basic coding challenge, the data pointed to what he calls the Super Mario Effect. He says to treat failure like losing a level in a video game: try again and figure out how to beat the level.

At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Rober worked on the Descent Stage of the Curiosity mission, which TED describes as the jet pack that lowered the rover to the surface. He also worked on some hardware on the rover's top deck for collecting samples. In 2012, Gizmodo reported that he joined JPL seven years earlier, started work on Curiosity right away and was responsible for the design of a part that would be important during the science part of the mission. He also earned a master's degree from the University of Southern California and volunteered on other JPL projects.

NASA says Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012 and was the largest robot ever to land on another planet at that time. It landed in Gale Crater, a crater with a tall mountain in the middle, whose many layers of rock are made of different minerals from different time periods. NASA says Curiosity set out to answer whether Mars ever had the right environmental conditions to support small life forms called microbes. It also says that early in the mission, Curiosity's scientific tools found chemical and mineral evidence of past habitable environments on Mars.

Rober built an automatic bull's-eye dartboard that predicts where a dart will land and moves itself in half a second to guarantee a perfect shot. It took him three and a half years to build. To make it work, he trained six stepper motors to respond to six infrared cameras and a motion-capture system. He also built a decoy package with four phone cameras inside that records what happens when it is opened.

He sneaks science into his big, silly builds. He has battled seed-stealing squirrels in his videos, and he built an obstacle course to keep squirrels away from a bird feeder. He also filled a pool with Jell-O. In 2011, his iPad Halloween costume helped launch his YouTube channel, and his first video that year got more than a million views. He used two iPads to make it look like he had a hole through the middle of his body.

In 2013, CNN reported that Rober had quit his job as a mechanical engineer at NASA and started Digital Dudz, a company making costumes that integrate tablets and smartphones. He also worked at Apple on product design in its Special Projects group. In 2018, CNBC and Variety reported from patent filings that he had been helping Apple develop virtual reality for entertainment in self-driving cars. While working at Apple, he kept making YouTube videos as a fun, creative outlet. In 2019, he left his job at Apple to make his YouTube channel his full-time work.

As of December 2022, MIT said his channel had 23 million subscribers and more than 3 billion views. In September 2021, the Institution of Engineering and Technology described him as having over 18 million subscribers. MIT lists two of his video titles as "Egg Drop From Space" and "Can You Swim in Jell-O?" and says that each video explores some aspect of science or engineering. As of April 2026, he puts up a new science or engineering video on YouTube about once a month.

Rober teamed up with the YouTuber MrBeast to help the environment. They started Team Trees, a project with a goal of planting 20 million trees, and Team Trees worked with the Arbor Day Foundation to plant them. They also started Team Seas to clean up trash from oceans, rivers and beaches.

In June 2023, Rober gave the main speech at the MIT graduation. His second piece of advice to MIT graduates was to frame their failures in a positive light, as something to learn from. He has been a guest on the TV show Jimmy Kimmel Live, and people have called him a Willy Wonka for engineers.

Rober started CrunchLabs, a company that makes kits for kids. CrunchLabs says its engineering factory is a real place in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. Kids use the kits to build things and learn about engineering, and CrunchLabs wants kids to learn to think like an engineer. Its Class CrunchLabs program gives teachers science lessons for free. Rober wants kids to love science and engineering. He says he hides the science like vegetables: kids click on a fun video, and the science comes along with it.

Words to know

• rover: Mars explorer
• microbes: small life forms
• Curiosity: a Mars rover
• kits: things to build