Mark Rober (former NASA) launches a 30 day Creative Engineering Class | Hacker News Reader

Mark Rober (former NASA) launches a 30 day Creative Engineering Class

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134 pointsO_H_E94 comments

This is clearly marketing, and clearly good one.

From what I can tell, it's a course that was mostly produced by someone else and will be delivered by someone else, but they recorded Mark Rober - the guy famous on YouTube for glitterbombing people - as the instructor. But their FAQ already states that he will "be able to" look at what students are doing and "may occasionally [..] give feedback", so most likely he won't be around to run the course.

Also, from watching the videos, I had the impression that the technical work is mostly done by other people, e.g. the famous glitterbomb was built by Sean Hodgins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpMxOmUcfOI

So first and foremost, it appears that Mark Rober is a great showman and a great narrator. Plus he's collaborating with people like Mr Beast who have the power of a skilled agency behind them (nightmedia.co) to produce just the right narrative to go viral. And his first videos appear to be sponsored by a marketing agency.

So I'm not surprised that this course is hyped up and not actually done by Mark Rober. I'd treat this more as a case study on how to perfect your social marketing ;)

That said, their core promise of building 3 own projects within 30 days sounds reasonable if they have skilled instructors running the course. And the price seems reasonable for such a learning experience. When I was younger, my dad built some technical projects with me. Over the course of a weekend, I would learn more about electrics and physics than in a year in school. And once you built something that actually works in the real world, you'll never go back to observing technology as a passive bystander. That attitude change alone might be worth the $250.

Plus, I believe Mark Rober to be a great showman. This course will likely be entertaining to watch, and paced just like a good movie.

It’s increasingly common for online courses and other material to be attached to famous influencers. Leveraging the influencer’s audience and credibility is a shortcut to gaining massive traction. People really, really trust their favorite influencers.

I was shocked when a semi-famous influencer admitted that one of the businesses that bears his name actually receives zero input from him, yet he takes 60% of the profits. He was approached by someone who wanted to use his name to jumpstart the audience and the deal was too good to pass up.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the recently publicized “Mr Beast Burger” is a similar collaboration. It’s pitched as something Mr Beast came up with, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some entrepreneurs were already building a ghost kitchen business and shopped it around to influencers who were willing to claim it was “theirs” in exchange for some of the profits.

Thanks for pointing this out. I've enjoyed quite a few of Mark's videos over the years. He's clearly smart and talented, but it was unsettling how insanely productive he seemed to be. That sort of thing naturally creeps into my subconscious and not in a healthy way.

He mentions the people he works with but the videos are still presented in a way that makes them feel like a single person production. I should've figured there was more to it than that.

After working on a few of my own ambitious side projects, I've come to realize there is no way in hell he does all that alone. There's a team of people helping him and designing the things he shows in his videos.

He also pollutes the environment with all of his projects. Filling his swimming pool with plastic balls for views.

You've posted this 3 times in response to comments on this thread. Do you have an axe to grind against Mark?

I don't think any body cares about that. Specially when you can collect the plastic balls (because it's in your pool) and recycle it (which I'm sure he did, I don't think he dumped it in his kitchen trash can). He also uses biodegradable glitter.

Biodegradable glitter is a marketing scam, fyi. https://www.getlemonhead.com/blog/the-truth-about-bio-degrad...

It depends on what sort of biodegradable glitter you're using. Some glitter is even edible.

I'm pretty sure the non-biodegradable regular glitter can be eaten too, but your shit will sparkle. Harm to humans is not the primary concern with microplastics.

Did you know that boat paint turned out to be the glitter industry mystery buyer? https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/duw480...

> biodegradable glitter

ok, wow. TIL such thing exists.

They don't. See links above.

If you read HN you know that recycling doesn’t work. If I care about the environment I’m not going to buy millions of plastic balls for views

How exactly is that polluting? Do you think he just abandoned the pool with the balls still present?

I can see an argument that its wasteful however.

When he's done with the stupid plastic balls, where are they gonna go?

You can say this about every sort of entertainment that require props or special effects.

> Also, from watching the videos, I had the impression that the technical work is mostly done by other people, e.g. the famous glitterbomb was built by Sean Hodgins.

That seems a little unfair. From the description is "Mark came to me with an idea and a design. Who knew a simple idea could turn out to be such a complicated device? [...] It was fun being able to bring Marks concepts, designs, and ideas to reality, and together work to solve each problem as they arose".

Mark releases about a video a month. No way can he do 12 projects a year entirely on his own. Everyone big on YouTube has a full team behind them. It's big business!

Is a company founder the only force behind a startup? No! They hire and build a company! But are they the driving force? That's often a fair statement.

I feel like you're pitching a story of "YouTube personalities are just a facade who don't do anything". Which I don't think is generally true. However I think the following is very true. "YouTube personalities have 10+ person teams behind them. And big channels have media empires pushing their brand."

I am indeed blown away by marketting efforts around this. They successfully and continuously targetted me on FB and the ad was effective enough to make me click. Now I see they got on HN which is hard for even legitimately deserving posts. They know their target demographic extremely well and knows how to get noticed. The ultimate give away for me was the fact that this cannot be good in-person class given such a huge marketting effort and potential enrollment that might be in order of 10s of thousands. Ultimately it's no more than buying a lesson video.

I think it is inevitable with online courses of this scale, that the instructor recorded for the video lectures can't be involved on the day to day of the course. It is the same for e.g. Coursera courses where it is peers and a bunch of students from the university answering questions in the forum not the professor.

I quite like the model of Schoolism.com art classes where you can either pay a monthly subscription for all access, start/finish any time or pay a quite a bit higher fee per course with fixed schedule and personalized feedback from the instructor

I was linked and ended up watching his last video where he advertises this course at the beginning and end. I agree that he is a great showman, but I felt like he was a bit misleading in regards to how much he would be participating in the class. I guess he's not lying when he says he would be "seeing [them] there" but I think that implies a little bit more of an active role.

Considering the size of his platform, limited engagement probably the most feasible thing to do...but I suspect that there will be a number of people signing up that will expect Mark to be present and open for engaging.

I've enjoyed Mark Rober's content over the years, but I'm skeptical for two reasons:

1. I think people frequently underestimate how useful it is to do the "boring" parts of engineering (or any discipline). The unfortunate reality is that a lot of learning (that can be applied generally) comes from failure / mistakes, and you don't really get that if you're taught "this is how you can make this particular cool thing". In other words: I don't think you can learn how to do the stuff Rober does on YouTube by Rober telling you how he does the stuff on YouTube. He is capable of that precisely because he studied engineering in school and worked at NASA etc and experienced failures and setbacks which, though not obviously related to making a glitter bomb or w/e, taught him lessons and skills that are helpful under the surface. This is generally why I'm skeptical of anyone that thinks they can distill down their success in a given field into a single book or video series, when invariably their success is a result of 10+ years of experience, practice, and overcoming obstacles.

2. Creativity is near impossible to teach, which effectively just makes this a 30 day engineering course, in which case see point (1).

Hopefully my skepticism is misplaced though and this is a very worthwhile course for a lot of people!

>This is generally why I'm skeptical of anyone that thinks they can distill down their success in a given field into a single book or video series, when invariably their success is a result of 10+ years of experience, practice, and overcoming obstacles.

I just want to complement you for this excellent distillation of the problem with this kind of course without descending into backhanded complements.

When I heard about the course, something did strike me as "off" in the sense of needing to be explained. It feels like a shortcut, a whirlwind tour, or worse, a "master class" that leaves out something important. And what it leaves out is the grind, and the tedium, and the meta-understanding that those are aspects of successful work.

I think your skepticism is well-placed. If this were a "30 day creative programming" course, I wonder what the HN reaction would be. My guess is that it would be: just pick a project and go for it, you don't need a class to start learning. Maybe atoms inspire more trepidation than bits though.

> Creativity is near impossible to teach

After "Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others" I'm not so sure about that.

The idea this book talks about - I think central, but not the only one - is that creativity at least closely related to combinations and transfer between fields.

"Where Good Ideas Come From" is similarly useful in this regard. "To form fresh ideas, it is necessary to explore the adjacent possible, and to have the widest adjacent possible, it is necessary to have the widest list of available ideas for recombination, the biggest list of spare parts available for recombination" ... quoting from my notes.

Right, that's kinda my point. Creativity isn't taught – it's enabled by 8 years of working at NASA and such, as Mark Rober has done.

But he can't communicate all of the skill transfer he is doing in a way that your brain will change to see things the way he does – no one can.

Thank you for the next book on my reading list :)

The real value is for an engineering expert (with a makerspace) to use Rober's class as a curriculum. I don't think it'll be great for an individual student.

From the FAQ:

> Throughout the class, you’ll share your ongoing work and give and receive peer feedback. Mark will also be able to check out students’ work, and may occasionally answer questions and give feedback.

> We can’t guarantee that Mark will comment on your work directly, but we’ve designed the class so that you’ll get thorough feedback from your peers. You’ll get personalized feedback by submitting your projects on time, documenting your process, and playing an active role in your group.

> Mark will also have access to the peer groups to answer questions, give feedback, and post responses during class. You will have complete access to all the feedback and answers Mark gives within your peer group and even within the other peer groups in the class. There’s a lot to learn from this ever-growing library of real student feedback.

This kind of sounds like a potential recipe for disaster. $250 for some pre-recorded videos and peer (i.e. a group of other learners randomly assigned to you) assessment? I could also see people being easily upset by a relative lack of direct involvement from Rober (esp given how much this course page hypes up his involvement outside of the FAQ).

$250 does not seem at all unreasonable even if the product consists only of high quality videos. I’ve spent $100 on good sets of videos before and was happy to do so.

I'd spend money on high quality videos (e.g. buying an egghead subscription was well worth the money a couple of years ago for me because there wasn't anything that came close to that resource at the time), but I doubt I'd really spend $250 on stuff that (at least from the subject titles + video descriptions) seems to be very general/somewhat intro level material. Then again, I don't think I'm the intended audience here :/

I think he's brilliant, and don't get the hate being directed at him here. He deserves his success.

Seriously surprising, actually.

I'd love to understand the source of it. Why people want to reduce his success to "showman", "milking it", "not actually done by him", etc? Why diminish something that makes the world a better place and is not taking anything away from others?

In the context of an electronics course, I consider it relevant that he asked someone else to do his electronics project.

Apart from that, I see "great showman" as a compliment. I watch BBC nature documentaries because David Attenborough is an amazing narrator. I don't care how much work he does on the movie apart from narrating it. I have the same view on Mark Rober. I don't usually care what or if he does something, I just want to see him present it in an interesting way. And he is amazing at the latter.

> I'd love to understand the source of it.

I certainly don't hate Mark Rober and am not at all trying to reduce his success - so take this as one opinion in response to your question. There is something about his YouTube content I don't personally enjoy. It's a little hard to articulate, but to me it feels cheesy. I understand his schtick is creating overengineered solutions to life's little annoyances, but his on-screen persona seems put on to me. I get the sense he's a super talented guy who also has an amazing crew and network of friends. I just don't have a swimming pool or access to a trillion orbeez, so perhaps I am more drawn to normal engineers making youtube videos about them hacking on their raspberry pi.

Since it's not mentioned until pretty far down the page I'll say that you likely know Rober as "the guy who glitter bombs package thieves on Youtube".

That first one the catapulted him into Youtube stardom turned out to be fake, right?

The device was not at all if that's what you meant. He got friends help to get the devices placed at different homes. Some of his "friends", however, staged thefts and didn't tell him. He pulled that footage within hours of the video going live.

The porch pirates were fake, but it wasn't Rober's fault. Several people he chose as test subjects (aka, people with doorsteps) ended up paying friends/neighbors to steal the package. Once Internet sleuths found this out and informed Rober, he removed the fake reactions from the video.

Not exactly. He had volunteers who placed the packages in front of their houses, and one of the volunteers had a friend or neighbor come by and take the package, faking the footage. It doesn't sound like Marc had anything to do with the incident and he has mentions the issue in the description of the video, though it's also a bit unclear why the volunteer would want to do this.

After his latest video I was wondering if his recording of the thieves in their homes runs afoul of wiretapping laws. I can appreciate that someone who just stole a package probably isn't likely to try to press charges, but made me wonder if he is just assuming that risk.

Maybe the box has a 'shrinkwrap' license agreeing to be recorded?

Surely there are provisions in the law for this? Otherwise I could just go to your home, steal one of your wireless security cameras, place it in my house and have you charged with wiretapping?

Right, but intent matters. You're not allowed to boobytrap your property, but beyond that you won't be held liable for burglars injuring themselves.

I mean, if instead of glitter and fart spray the thing was wired specifically to explode and kill the thief, the argument "they stole my explosives and blew themselves up" won't hold water.

I'm curious what a court would rule on this matter - anywhere from fart spray over property damage to death.

> You're not allowed to boobytrap your property

Apparently no-one told Kevin McCallister

He was home alone.

The box has a lot of text on it to indicate it's a fake product. I wonder if it mentions the microphone.

The project bugs me a bit, as it's designed to find the 3% of people (IIRC from Rober's report) willing to steal and open an obvious fake package -- dumb kids, or mentally ill, or desperate and stupid.

Also, he's famous, so he's risking retaliation bombs.

What bugged me was the complete lack of depth, one of the most interesting (and pertinent) topics surrounding the use of these devices are the legal implications.

There is no state that allows you to bug someone else's conversation. Intentionally causing a surveillance device to be installed in someone's home (which he clearly did) without their consent must present some legal issues?

Likewise, individuals are in some cases liable for the results traps they set. For example, the countdown (on the latest video) is troubling because it's reasonable to expect people to panic, and act erratically in response. What happens if they seriously injure themselves trying to escape the imagined bomb?

Someone else doing something illegal (stealing your "trap" package) doesn't protect you from prosecution or lawsuits.

Anyway, it would hear about the discussion with they had with lawyers before they did this. There's very little depth in many of the more recent videos. They're merely entertainment, not educational/engineering videos.

I guess he'd have to do it in a one-party consent state to be safe? But is this fundamentally different from all the surveillance camera footage of gas station robberies you can find online? Also I believe local news stations like to broadcast footage of porch thieves too.

Example: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Buce4AbOO9k

Who would be the one party consenting in the case of a hidden camera package?

The guy who pollutes the environment on YouTube

Gets a lot of mileage out of working at NASA for 8 years. Personally I'd save the $250 and just go watch Ben Krasnow @ YouTube Applied Science.

if you are a self starter or a self directed learner, an online course is not the way to go. Start with a desire to do something, then search online for how to do it.

The comments hating on Rober are way off base.

He has been on youtube for nearly 10 years making videos, and as he gained success, he started to work with more and more people to do even more amazing work.

Watch one of his initial videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1P6K_PaS0A) and compare to his work now.

Agree that his Youtube content is great, I think the skepticism is about whether or not having a cool Youtube channel translates into being good at teaching an engineering course. I hope it turns out to be something that's great and worth the money, but if I were a betting person, based on my past experience with a lot of on-line courses, I'd bet it's not. It's unfortunate that in order to tell if a course is actually any good, you'll have to invest a considerable amount of time an effort before you realize it's not any good. I've wasted so many hours into bad courses that I have to wait until one is recommended over and over again before I'll give it a chance.

This guy sure gets a lot of milage out of his past employer. It's rare to hear him mentioned without NASA being mentioned in the same breath.

It's pretty common for YouTubers who have a big past employer or specialist career.

Ali Abdaal is one I have seen pop up a lot this year. Every video of his mentions he studied at Cambridge and is a Doctor. Clearly it works quite well for the audience he is targeting as he has over 1.2 million subscribers on YouTube with an highly engaged subscriber base.

His content isn't anything special when you look at it and he plays a lot on his "socially awkward" personality which seems to work well with people seeking out self-improvement advice.

These people sure are excellent at marketing so I guess fair play to them. Ali isn't hurting anyone with his generic advice, probably quite the opposite in fact so I fair enough to him.

On the other hand you have channels like Applied Science where he rarely ever mentions that he's employed by Google, except in rare Q&A videos. His channel is popular because he shows off really neat stuff in good detail, rather than dazzling people with his credentials.

I love Ben's videos however perhaps if he followed the marketing strategy of Mark Rober or Ali Abdaal he would have more than 700k subscribers.

Not that 700k is bad at all, it is just an observation at how many subscribers some of these people can get primarily through name dropping.

However I don't think Ben is all that fussed about chasing every subscriber like Mark and Ali.

It definitely lends credibility; versus the introduction from the other comment - that this is the guy that glitter bombs package thieves on youtube - which makes me take this less seriously.

I'd recommend watching those videos before knocking him for the glitter bombs. They are impressively engineered, with entertaining videos which contain a good deal of detail about how, why, and in the most recent version, how they are working with law enforcement to crack down on package thieves.

Just adding a +1 to this comment. Those glitter bombs were non-trivial, so say the least.

If you’re into this type of engineering check out “stuff made here” or “BPS Space”.

"Stuff Made Here" is amazing. I can't believe how talented that guy is. And he seems much less edited/fake than Rober (who I also enjoy). I watch both of their videos whenever they upload a new one, but "Stuff Made Here" appeals much more to my engineering side, and I appreciate the lack of "showmanship" that is so prevalent in Rober videos.

Rober cuts to the chase. I think it's tuned for a different audience. "Stuff Made Here" guy is willing to show all of the "wrong turns" on the way to a good design. Rober's audience doesn't get a chance to get bored with one of those wrong turns and change the channel. But "Stuff Made Here" will attract an audience that is curious about the process that got him there.

Stuff Made Here guy's workshop is peak envy. The tools he's got there are just incredible.

not to mention he's gotten almost 2m subscribers in less than a year on ~20 purely engineering focused videos.

I hope Joe is doing alright. He just announced he's burned out and taking a break. I'm sure he could use it. He's done some impressive stuff.

> They are impressively engineered

By someone else

Those packages are designed incredibly well, IMO. There's a lot of things that can go wrong and he seems to reliably get footage of it being opened and recovers most of the packages, too.

Hey I'd milk it, too.

Don't forget he also worked for Apple.

Which to me seems way more impressive than working for NASA

Really, what’s your reasoning? I’d rather have NASA on my resume than any of the FAANGs. Especially if I was an engineer. Building spaceship bits? Sign me up.

Not OP, but NASA is very old school and the tech stack is old, not to mention that things move slower than a turtle (so much bureaucracy) and the fear of losing funding. It's just not a great place to work for anecdotally speaking. At best, it's an ok place to work for. Oh and I forgot to mention the crazy low salaries across the board, and yearly raises that are below inflation rate.

He has to differentiate himself from the posters, because he's too good-looking and laid-back-looking for people to not prejudge him before seeing his impressive engineering talent.

Unlike the founders that went to Stanford MIT, or who are ex-Apple/Google/FB etc. Headlines are short, and you have to get a lot done with as few words as possible. NASA is strongly associated with "smart engineering and problem solving" - good branding for a course like this.

I think he just tries hard to market his content to a very broad market unlike many science/engineering Youtubers.

I would enjoy content from him that doesn't have that feeling of being watered down, however.

Rober just put out a new video with version 3.0 of his Glitter Bomb, and the engineering is seriously impressive. I’m sure he gets lots of help on his projects from others at this point, but I still have a lot of admiration for this guy.

The video is pretty funny, too!

https://youtu.be/h4T_LlK1VE4

I agree it is very impressive, but I wish he'd do something new for the holiday season. I feel like v3 is basically v2, but you can't put the lid back on. I wish he'd shake things up a bit.

I saw this and found it interesting. As a CS guy and software engineer, I've always wanted to combine that knowledge with actual physical engineering (i.e. mechanical and electrical) in order to build cool stuff and complete my knowledge base as an engineer.

I've always seen his videos and wanted to be able to prototype and engineer actual physical things like him, rather than spending my whole life building software (although software pays the bills - nothing wrong with that). I wonder how far the course would actually be able to take me - it would be interesting to see.

The course seems a bit high priced and I don't have time at the moment, but I'll definitely keep my eye on it and wait to see the reviews.

For people that want to learn "physical engineering", I recommend the same thing I do when people ask people the best way to learn software engineering: you need a project.

Find something in your life that you want to automate, and automate it. Motivation is easier to maintain ("I still want this problem fixed") and you'll learn so much more from failure and iteration than you will following someone else's tutorial about "how to build X".

> Former NASA engineer and YouTuber Mark Rober teaches you everything he knows in this one-month class

Why do they need to exaggerate like this? Obviously he cannot share everything he learned over years of study and practice in a month.

1) the statement "everyrging be knows" is wholely unnecessary.

2) these exaggerated claims are really off putting to me and make me less, not more, likely to buy the service.

They need to exaggerate to get your sweet sweet 250 dollars

Seems like this is more about teaching about application engineering rather than the engineering theories. If this is the case, I don't think the $250 is worth it? You'll probably get much further mileage by just using that $250 to make stuff. Get some cardboard, popsicle sticks (or even wood) + arduino and sensors with grove connectors.

I'd love for Mark Rober to make an accredited physics class for high school students. It would be a huge undertaking, but I could see it becoming the standard for distance learning. He could even do it in pieces, in partnership with Khan Academy. Heck, I'd pay for a Kickstarter for this.

Similarly, it would be amazing for Randall Munroe (of XKCD fame) to write a physics textbook.

Relatedly, he did some classes in March/April this year, live on Youtube. The first one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPn-Bay_ANU

I bought the course and did the first day. It is pretty good so far. And definitely a great way to get yourself to actually work on the 'idea' you have had for a while. Dropping money motivate people, including me.

I like Mark Rober, but $250 is a bit steep.

Looks great, but I'm skeptical on the "bringing 3 of your own builds to life" at the end of 30 days, especially if you lack the tens of thousands of dollars of tools that Mark has.

You don't need 10s of thousands of dollars worth of tools to build something.

Especially if those things were specifically chosen because they don't require 10s of thousands of dollars worth of tools.

This guy is doing a lot to pollute the environment just to get views on YouTube. Filling a swimming pool with plastic balls is one example. Has he heard of plastic pollution?

Also the guy that helped and donated $50,000 to team trees. Clearly you're trying to find a point to hate on him without acknowledging the good he's done.

So if I pollute a lot but donate to a good cause then it's ok?

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