Mark Rober's Creative Engineering Course

Even though I’m a seasoned engineer, I thought it would be fun to take Mark Rober’s Creative Engineering Course on Studio to see his approach to teaching the principles of the engineering process and share them with my kids. So I signed up with my brother and dove right in.

Overall, I enjoyed the class, even though it was a bit too fast-paced for me. I was only able to finish the first two builds. While the course is designed to be taken at your leisure, and you can go back and watch any part as often as you wish, there are still deadlines to keep the class progressing together and encourage collaboration.

It was no surprise that the course was geared toward a younger audience with more time on their hands and little knowledge of engineering. Even though people of all ages paid for the course, Mark Rober essentially ignored the older participants in the class chats, which was a real bummer!

The whole course was also centered on making engineering builds for YouTube content. That makes sense, as that’s what he does, but it made it painfully clear that most of what he builds for his YouTube channel only has to hold up for a few great shots and then look good on a shelf. That totally killed the “magic” of his content for me.

I always imagined Mark Rober to be some super-talented engineer, but I realized that his talent isn’t so much in engineering as in content creation, presentation, and perhaps marketing. Even so, the material was put together very well, and the sessions built upon each other nicely. I’d still recommend it to anyone wanting to learn the basics of engineering principles and get hands-on experience. I’ve even used some of his methods to help teach interns at my company about the engineering process in a simple, straightforward way.