Mark Rober: Why Children Need to See Failure

YouTube creator and mechanical engineer Mark Rober has recently secured an opportunity to work on a Netflix project. For Rober, content creation is not simply about showing a successful experiment. It is about letting children see the repeated attempts, adjustments and failures behind the final result. He believes that encouraging curiosity and hands-on problem-solving also supports the long-term value of digital content, educational products and toys.

From NASA engineer to content creator

Rober was fascinated by taking apart and experimenting with toys as a child, including sending a spring toy down the stairs. As an adult, he developed similar ideas into projects such as an “infinite spring staircase.” He says mechanical engineering gave him the ability to turn ideas in his head into physical objects, describing engineering itself as a real-world “superpower.”

In high school, Rober was interested in both physics and video production. The equipment available to him was far from ideal, but he continued making videos. He has said he dislikes public speaking, yet through repeated attempts to explain and create, he gradually discovered that communicating a clear idea could itself be part of the creative process.

He later worked as a mechanical engineer at NASA. Outside work, Rober continued producing animations, and some of those side projects eventually became visual material used by NASA’s Mars rover program. The problem-solving skills he developed at NASA have since carried over into his toy designs and experimental videos.

Rober believes toy engineering can be more difficult than aerospace engineering in some respects. Aerospace teams can address certain problems by increasing a project’s budget. Toy designers, by contrast, must work within tight limits involving cost, materials, safety and entertainment value. Creating a product that remains fun under those constraints is a different kind of engineering challenge.

Where toy design meets children’s education

Rober wants children to gain more from experiments than a final answer. He wants them to experience asking questions, making something with their own hands and dealing with failure. His videos retain unsuccessful attempts because they happen in almost every experiment. For children, seeing that a creator cannot get everything right on the first try can ease the pressure to succeed immediately.

He compares the process with his childhood experience playing Super Mario Bros. When a game character fails, players generally do not stop playing. They use what happened to try again. Rober sees real-world challenges in a similar way: failure can make a task more difficult and emotionally demanding, but it also provides information for correction and another attempt.

That approach also shapes Rober’s toys and video content. Products need to be entertaining, but they should also encourage users to take them apart, modify them and keep experimenting. In a children’s business, continued engagement and learning may matter more to repeat use than completing a task successfully just once.

Rober does not see his son’s autism as something to fix

Rober’s 19-year-old son is autistic. For years, father and son have maintained a consistent bedtime routine that includes spending the night with stuffed animals. His son enjoys repetition, and Rober tells the same jokes every day, treating that stable interaction as an important part of family life.

Rober says he has never regretted that his son is autistic and has never wished to change it. In his view, society often defines success through a person’s contribution to gross domestic product, career achievements or income. A more important question, he says, is whether someone has made the world around them better.

He has also said that even if he were offered a button that would remove his son’s autism in exchange for $1 billion, he would not press it. The statement reflects Rober’s broader view that success and value cannot be measured solely by wealth, job title or business scale. They are also tied to family relationships, personal dignity and the effect a person has on others.

His mother’s influence continues after her death

Rober’s mother, Carolyn, had a rare and rapidly progressing form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. She died about 15 years ago, six months before Rober uploaded his first YouTube video.

She often repeated the saying: “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.” Carolyn devoted much of her energy to raising her children and did not live to see what they later achieved. Rober says she nevertheless remains one of the people who has influenced him most.

Rober believes a person’s real influence is often impossible to measure in the short term. He hopes to make more young people curious about the natural world and to help parents and children create moments that prompt them to ask questions.

In the AI era, asking questions matters more

As artificial intelligence tools become more widely available, children can use devices in their pockets to obtain answers to almost any question quickly. Rober believes education should not focus only on supplying more answers in that environment. It should also help children develop the curiosity to keep asking questions.

He wants viewers to finish a video with more than a memory of an experiment’s result. His aim is for them to look around, identify a new question and try to build or test something themselves. For Rober, failure is not a flaw that should be hidden from content. It is part of engineering, learning and creative work.

From NASA’s Mars rover program to toy design and the planned expansion of his content business into Netflix, Rober’s career has followed the same method: break a problem down, try something hands-on, document what did not work and continue improving. For parents and children, the more relevant question may not be whether an experiment succeeds the first time, but whether they are willing to start again after it fails.