TED Talks Daily - My $60 million science experiment | Mark Rober

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

Mark Rober spent years trying to land a rover on Mars. Now, the former NASA engineer turned science YouTuber with millions of subscribers is launching a new mission: to teach the next generation of big problem solvers. That's why he's spending 60 million dollars to build a STEM curriculum kids actually want. With squirrel obstacle courses, giant lasers and elephant toothpaste explosions, who wouldn't want to learn from YouTube's top engineer? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Science educator Mark Rober has spent years cracking the code on how to teach a generation raised on social media. There is a time and a place for equations. For a generation that has grown up on TikTok and YouTube, you have to make it matter with something that gets them to lean forward in their seat. Something that ignites a little curiosity fire in their brain. And we need that today more than ever. In his talk, complete with live demos right on the TED stage,

Mark takes us inside his approach to creating the world's most exciting science lessons and debuts a new initiative to help teachers across the world do the same. Quick heads up, the talk begins with an explosion. It's all coming up right after a short break. And now our TED Talk of the Day. I want to start off tonight with a two-step experiment. For step one, I've got a two-liter bottle here. It's half filled with liquid nitrogen.

That's negative 320 degrees Fahrenheit. It's violently boiling off into a gas. Just like boiling water does on a hot stove, because of this freezing cold liquid nitrogen, the nice, comfy air in this room is super hot. But here's the catch. The gas form of nitrogen occupies 700 times the volume of the liquid. So you've got to be really careful as it's turning into a gas.

You don't trap it in a small container, like if the lid was screwed on top here. So then for step two, I'm going to go ahead and screw the lid on top. And when I do, if everything goes according to plan, the contents of this bottle should experience what we refer to at NASA as an energetic, spontaneous, rapid disassembly. It's going to explode. All right, here we go.

Put that on. Okay. Now this is going to be... Oh, you know what? What the heck? Might as well throw these on top. Hey, all. Elise here.

jumping in real quick to share what's happening on stage. There are two large red plastic barrels on either side of Mark. He just put the plastic water bottle filled with liquid nitrogen into one of the red bins and then takes a second one full of hundreds of white ping pong balls and dumps them on top of the water bottle that he's placed into one of them. This is going to be real boring until it's not. If you don't like loud noises, cover years. But according to my calculations, things could get real interesting here in about three, two, one.

One. One. I said one. I'm just kidding. It's really impossible to actually calculate exactly... Whoa! How's your jet lag now? All right.

My apologies to my friends in the front row. You should be warned it will get worse before it gets better. I'm like, Science Gallagher up here. So a lot of people look at that and be like, oh, neat, the ping pong balls exploded. But what actually happened is so much cooler because as more and more of that nitrogen turned into a gas, those gas molecules got more and more crowded

as they pushed back on the plastic molecules comprising the walls of the 2-liter bottle. And then eventually, the pressure got so great, it got so crowded. The walls of the 2-3 bottle lost the game of molecular red bottle, rover and all the gas came rushing out. But where could it go? Because it can't go down or to the sides. Trashcan's too thick. Therefore, the only option is to go up. And since all the ping pong balls are in the way, they just happen to go along for the ride. But here's the really cool part. This is exactly

how cannons fire cannon balls. It's how nerve flasters fire nerve darts. It's how T-shirt cannons. fire t-shirts. And for my friends in the front row, it's how straws fire spitwats. I'm just kidding. The trick for all those is you simply build up enough pressure, you suddenly release it in one direction

and plop whatever you want in the way to go along for the ride. And I love when I get like that aha moment, when I understand the world around me with a new framework, but even more than that, love giving that to other people. This is why, for the last 15 years,

once a month, I've uploaded a free science or engineering video to YouTube to my now 75 million subscribers who also have a taste for those aha moments. And the videos, thank you, the videos can range anywhere from an elephant-toothpaced volcano that sets a world record to a satellite that's orbiting about us right now that we built that you can upload your picture to for free and then it will display it on a screen and then give you a selfie in space with a little. the earth photo bombing you, or even a soccer goalie, moves back and forth at 40 miles an hour, and then we track your shots so effectively, not even the world's greatest player. Ooh!

Can score on it. Sorry, Ronaldo. And 16 billion views later, what I've learned is I can't teach you if I don't have your attention. But if I can get your attention with something remarkable, well, now I suddenly have something to attach the learning to. This is why it kills me if someone's like, oh, I don't like science because it's boring. But the same time I get it,

because instead of learning about pressure, the way I did with these ping pong balls, a lot of times it's done like this. With curiosity, murdering phrases, like consider a rigid container of volume V. It's a freaking trash can. All right? And don't get me wrong.

Like, there is a time and a place for equations. For a generation that has grown up on TikTok and YouTube, you have to make it matter with something that gets them to lean forward in their seat, something that ignites a little curiosity fire in their brain. And we need that today more than ever. I like to call this style of teaching, hiding the vegetables. For example, it's really boring if you make a video about the scientific method,

but what's not boring is if you make a video about a 15-ton jello pool, you can actually bellow flop onto. And in the process, I'm going to sneak in all six steps of the scientific method. What's also really boring is memorizing an equation about terminal velocity. But what's not boring is you point out that squirrels are one of the only mammals that can survive a fall from any height at their terminal velocity. And then in an effort to keep them from stealing all your bird seed, you set up an eight-part ninja warrior obstacle course in your backyard.

and in the process, what you might find is they will voluntarily demonstrate this principle for you. It's a very true story. There's also a ton of super-boring microcontroller tutorial videos online. So when someone came by and stole a package from my porch, I decided to dedicate a year of my life to making the world's least boring microcontroller tutorial video. Step one, you make a bait person,

package, and on the outside, you have something like a picture of headphones. But inside instead of headphones, you have this contraption. And at the top there, there's a cup that spends a pound of the world's finest glitter. You have four phones that will record, then upload their footage to the cloud real time, and it's the pieste resistance, a very uncharitable amount of fart spray. That's foreshadowing. And then step two, you have the thief come by, and he lifts the lid, takes it home. Of course, it sprays the glitter, followed by the fart spray.

I should point out, by the way, this whole video was sort of a modern-day homage to the greatest film of a generation. I'm talking, of course, about home alone. And so the thief here who's pretending is none of my buddy McCauley Culkin. And so then for step three, what you and McCauley are going to do is you're going to make 20 of these. You're going to put them on porches all across America, and it won't take long before you start getting back some incredible footage like this. Here, Mark shows us what he's talking about. He plays a video of someone taking home the package,

opening the box, and then their reaction as they get hit with an explosion of glitter and fart spray. By the way, I was watching, and when that thief was about to lift the lid on the glitter bomb, not a single one of you was looking down or was on your phones. I had your undivided attention, and that makes for the most first, brain soil because learning is best when it's attached to a visceral experience.

Basically, if you feel something here, you remember it here. Here, Mark rubbed his heart and then pointed to his head. This is why memorizing a boring equation is hard, but, you know, remembering that song he sang as a teenager that made you feel all those feels. That's easy. And you remember every single lyric, you know, 30 years later. And to be fair, I didn't come up with this style of teaching. All great teachers know this.

know this. For me, it was Mr. Malloy. He was my high school statistics teacher. Hello, Mr. Malloy, if you're watching this. And he was great, not just because he had a killer doctor evil impression. He was great because he made it matter, like encouraging us to use what we learn in statistics, to predict where our arch-rival soccer team was going to kick their penalty kicks. And it worked. He was so good at attaching emotions to learning. He was so good at hiding the vegetables. The thing is, with a really good teacher, their impact is immeasurable, just like Mr. Molloy impacted his students, and we're in now, in turn, impacting the world. This is why I love teachers. I think they have the most important job on the planet. In fact, please.

I've said for like a decade my dream job is to be a middle school science teacher, and I will be, but until that time, and buckle up, because this is the first time the world is hearing about this. But for the last two and a half years, myself, with a team of about 50 people, including some of the best science teachers in the country, we've been secretly working on a full science curriculum, and it uses all the tricks I've learned for the past 15 years on how to hide the vegetables.

And the reason we're doing this is because it breaks my heart when I see teachers who get paid salaries as a society we should be ashamed of, spending their own money on resources that totally suck. So it's got everything they'd need. From Bangor videos, the kids are going to beg to rewatch that demonstrate the science. Yes, that is a wrench in an MRI machine,

because how else am I supposed to talk about the invisible magnetic fields all around us? It's got ready to teach classroom slide decks that are super clean and easy to use. And then it's got these really thought-out, you know, curated science demos, where the kids get to viscerally interact with the science that the teachers could make

just with stuff they have lying around. their classroom. And so the idea is that together we teach the classroom. And the teacher becomes the hero as we engage the students in real science and engineering they actually care about. We're starting with grades three through eight. It exceeds all the state science standards, but most importantly, it's exactly what science class is meant to be. Super freaking fun. The world has evolved, and teaching science is long overdue for disruption. I'm happy to report that of the teachers who are assigned to teach the pilot lessons to their students

because of our ability to explain complicated things simply and for our very unique experience in solving the science motivation gap for 15 years, 95% of the teachers said that when we're done, they would want this to be their full science curriculum. And so the idea is you combine incredible teachers with incredible resources to get this explosive output, sort of like you'd expect to see

if you combine this bucket of boiling water with this trash can of freezing cold liquid nitrogen. So all those teachers out there in the trenches, I want you to know, reinforcements are on the way. In fact, a bunch of the videos and lessons are already available right now. We'll finish the rest over the next four years because I know this will be the most important thing

I do my whole life. And even though this is going to cost us $60 million to make, my official declaration tonight is every single lesson plan, every teacher training, every original class demo will cost exactly $0 and be 100% free for all teachers forever as we work to ignite those brainfires of curiosity in the next generation of big problem solvers. Thank you so much.

That was Mark Rober speaking at TED 2026. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonica, Song Marnivong.

This episode was mixed by Christopher Faisi Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balareso. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.