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

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

#51

Post by smoe »

fxtentacle wrote: post #30

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…

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

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

#52

Post by fxtentacle »

unreal37 wrote: post #49

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.

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

#53

Post by fxtentacle »

avmich wrote: post #29
fastball wrote: post #22

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".…

> 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.

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

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

#54

Post by syntaxing »

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.

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

#55

Post by Serious_Cheese »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #45
dvdbloc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#56

Post by thaumaturgy »

fxtentacle wrote: post #30

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…

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.

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

#57

Post by forrestthewoods »

fxtentacle wrote: post #30

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…

> 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."

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

#58

Post by lnwlebjel »

avmich wrote: post #29
fastball wrote: post #22

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".…

> 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.

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

#59

Post by satysin »

bigbubba wrote: post #2

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.

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

#60

Post by Osiris »

> 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.

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