INSPIRATION SERIES · ENGINEERING & CURIOSITY
Mark Rober.
Makes you want to know
why it worked.
By Rob Urban
A squirrel has no interest in your engineering degree. It wants the food. If you have placed a complicated obstacle between the squirrel and the food, the squirrel now has a complicated afternoon.
Mark Rober understood that this could be a story. His backyard squirrel obstacle-course videos turn an ordinary irritation into a contest an audience can understand immediately. No one needs to arrive knowing mechanics. We know what the squirrel wants. We want to know whether it can get there.
That is a small example of an unusually valuable talent. Rober can make the question entertaining before he makes the answer educational. The former NASA engineer and founder of CrunchLabs did not become interesting by hiding the engineering. He became interesting by finding situations in which the engineering had something lively to explain.
I like the absurdity. I also like what happens underneath it. For a few minutes, the audience is predicting, revising and trying to understand a mechanism. Curiosity has slipped past the part of the brain that was prepared to announce it was never good at science.
The engineer arrived before the audience
Rober grew up in Brea, California, and studied mechanical engineering at Brigham Young University. He went on to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and earned a master’s degree at the University of Southern California while working there. His nine years at NASA included seven on the Curiosity rover; Apple came later. Rober describes that engineering background in his PBS interview.
The childhood detail I find most revealing comes from BYU’s interview-based profile. Rober remembered his mother encouraging his creations, including an improvised wooden violin and goggles worn while cutting onions. Those are two very different projects. One attempts to make something beautiful; the other attempts to make dinner less personally upsetting.
The same profile describes a college engineering presentation in which he made a difficult subject understandable and funny. That combination is easy to dismiss as personality until you consider the work involved. You have to understand the material, anticipate what the audience does not understand, and find a route between the two that does not lose either the facts or the room. BYU’s profile, based on interviews with Rober, family and colleagues.
That is not a lesser technical skill. An idea that cannot be communicated has fewer places to go. A designer may need a machinist to understand a constraint, a colleague to question an assumption or a decision-maker to see why a revision matters. The audience changes. The need to make the problem legible remains.
At JPL, Rober worked inside teams where cleverness had to cooperate with other people’s expertise. A mechanism had to meet requirements that did not care how charming the explanation sounded.
A rover does not get a second take because the first shot would have looked better from another angle. Rober carried that familiarity with stubborn physical problems into an entirely different kind of work.
A Halloween costume opened a different door
In 2011, Rober posted a costume video using two iPads to create the appearance of a hole through his torso. It was a comprehensible visual joke built from available technology. Digital Dudz, his costume business, followed; he sold it in 2013. His YouTube work developed alongside, rather than simply after, conventional employment. Early video and business history.
The costume is a good origin point because it is so cheerfully unnecessary. Nobody urgently needed the illusion of seeing through somebody at a Halloween party. The pleasure came from recombining familiar things into an unfamiliar effect.
There is a particular kind of satisfaction in that. Once somebody explains the arrangement, you can see why it works. The explanation does not erase the fun. It gives the fun an additional layer: someone noticed a possibility hiding in devices other people were using normally.
The account of Rober’s moving dartboard in the BYU profile makes that distinction tangible. The board was designed to move into the path of a thrown dart. Its development took years, with cameras, motors and motion capture contributing to the result. The article describes the uncertainty that remained before its television demonstration. Reporting on the moving dartboard and its development.
The ridiculous premise contains a serious problem. Ordinarily the person tries to hit the target. Here the target tries to get hit. Change that one assumption and a familiar pub activity becomes a coordination problem. It also becomes an excellent way to make the person throwing the dart feel temporarily overqualified.
The squirrel gets a vote
The designer’s defeat can be the most satisfying outcome.
Rober’s first backyard squirrel-maze video appeared in 2020, with later variations following. The premise placed obstacles between squirrels and a food reward. Unlike a machine demonstration in which every component has been designed for the test, the living participant brings behavior the builder cannot script. Rober’s original squirrel-maze video.
That makes the story different from a simple display of technical control. The audience is watching the designer’s expectations meet another creature’s persistence and adaptability. The setup has rules we can follow, but we do not know precisely how the next attempt will unfold.
To me, the storytelling strength is that the viewer has something to predict. An obstacle becomes meaningful before it is attempted. A camera angle can help us understand the distance or the movement. The result can then surprise us for a reason, rather than merely arrive as another burst of activity.
There is also a shift in allegiance. The nominal goal may involve protecting a bird feeder, but an audience can find itself rooting for the small animal confronting an elaborate human invention. The designer’s defeat can be the most satisfying outcome. The joke gets better when the squirrel wins.
A child’s next question might be about balance. An adult’s might be about the design of the obstacle. Somebody else may simply enjoy watching an animal refuse to respect a production budget. Not every viewer needs to leave with the same lesson for the work to have value.
CrunchLabs puts the mechanism in a learner’s hands
Rober launched CrunchLabs in 2022. The company sells hands-on building projects and presents its aim as helping people think like engineers, rather than insisting they choose engineering as a profession. Its own description credits a team of engineers, designers and makers. CrunchLabs describes its team and approach.
The change in medium matters. A video can select the successful run, speed past a repetitive step and move to another camera. A box delivered to a home has to meet someone at a table with real parts, limited patience and perhaps a sibling who has already misplaced something essential.
That is a different design challenge. Instructions must communicate without the builder standing beside the customer. Parts must fit. The activity needs to help the builder understand what makes the assembled object work. The explanation has to survive leaving the screen.
I would distinguish three experiences. A child can watch an object work. A child can follow instructions to make an object work. A child can change something and begin explaining why the result changed. All three can be enjoyable, but they are not identical achievements.
The useful invitation is modest and powerful: make a prediction, try something within safe limits, look closely at the result, and put your explanation into your own words. The satisfying moment comes when the builder can explain a change instead of simply following the next step. That is the possibility I find worth admiring in the move from videos to things people can make.
Give the audience somewhere to take the curiosity
Rober’s collaborations with MrBeast extend the same interest in a clear premise to fundraising. TeamTrees connected creator attention with the Arbor Day Foundation’s tree-planting work. TeamSeas brought Ocean Conservancy and The Ocean Cleanup into a campaign built around removing trash from beaches, rivers and the ocean. The campaigns gave audiences an understandable way to contribute while specialist organizations handled implementation. TeamSeas explains the campaign’s origins and partners.
What I admire is the use of communication skill to make participation less abstract. A huge environmental problem can leave people feeling they have no useful place to begin. A defined project gives them an action to understand. The specialist partners give that invitation somewhere practical to go.
The partnership with MrBeast shows another use for Rober’s explanatory talent: give people a problem they can understand and a way to take part.
There is a temptation to describe someone like Mark Rober as making science easy. I think that misses the more respectful accomplishment. Difficult things can remain difficult while becoming inviting.
He does not need the viewer to arrive with an identity as a technical person. He gives the viewer a reason to wonder. An onion, a costume, a dartboard, a squirrel: the entrance can be wonderfully ordinary, or wonderfully ridiculous.
A good reveal ends a video. Rober is most interesting when it starts something else.
A few useful answers
What did Mark Rober do before YouTube became his full-time work?
Rober was an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where his work included the Curiosity rover. He later worked at Apple. His first YouTube video appeared in 2011, while he was still working at NASA.
What is CrunchLabs?
CrunchLabs is the company Mark Rober founded in 2022. It sells hands-on building projects and accompanying explanations intended to help people think like engineers.
Why does this profile focus on the squirrel obstacle course?
The squirrel course makes the design problem understandable before the attempt begins. Readers and viewers can predict a result, watch what happens and reconsider the mechanism. That invitation to think is the center of this portrait.
Keep wondering
By Rob Urban. Sources include BYU’s interview-based profile, Rober’s PBS interview and original squirrel video, CrunchLabs’ company information, and the TeamTrees and TeamSeas project sites.
If your own work takes some explaining, I help organizations find the story that makes it understandable.
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