How a YouTuber Got Inside the Heads of Silicon Valley’s Families

The former NASA and Apple engineer Mark Rober has become a YouTube sensation by building puzzle-solving robots, filling pools with Jell-O and perpetrating pranks. But can he deliver STEM wisdom amid all the explosions and Nerf guns?

Last fall, Satyajeet Salgar, the director of product management and user experience at Google AI, was huddled outside his kids’ Palo Alto, Calif., elementary school with a group of parents who were there for a class performance. The parents began talking about their kids’ favorite shows, and the conversation landed on the topic of Mark Rober, a YouTuber.

Each of the parents discussed watching videos made by Rober—a former NASA and Apple engineer who specializes in explaining scientific concepts through wacky experiments—with and without their kids. Those experiments have included filling a pool with Jell-O, making the world’s smallest and largest Nerf guns and building an underwater maze for an octopus.

At the moment, Rober is working on an ambitious two-part video that will involve sending a satellite to space. Although Rober is mum on most other details about the project, he said it will cost around $4 million.