Help Surrey Students Design a Lunar Rover and Promote STEM

What if you could build a bridge? A bridge to connect innovating youth, inspire younger children, and pave the way for a brighter future for our community.

That bridge is the Nova Design Team and instead of building bridges, we are designing Virtue, the next Lunar Rover for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). We are a group of ten engineering-loving high school students from Surrey, British Columbia.

In September 2023, our team (formerly the LeoCraft Design Team) became the first Canadian contingent ever selected for the NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge. Competing against the world’s best universities, colleges, and high schools, we designed, built, and tested our human powered rover.

Unfortunately, our community has not always been involved in the STEM future. Looking around, representation of people from our neighbourhoods and communities takes a back seat within various science and engineering careers.

Therefore, along with designing our rover, we have made it our mission to involve our community and promote STEM careers for the next generation. We are honoured to share that over the past year, our team has engaged with 2200+ local youth. We were also awarded the 2024 NASA STEM Engagement Award.

After last year’s success, our team has once again been selected by NASA to design a new vehicle. We are working on Virtue, a completely electronic (and potentially autonomous) rover designed to traverse both, Lunar and Martian terrain.

We would like to put Surrey and our nation on the map as the next great innovator, while also inspiring tomorrow’s workforce. In order to construct our rover and travel to the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in April 2025, we need an estimated $45,000 in funding.

Please join us in building this bridge! Everything helps.

For more information, please visit our Instagram.