 In the Vertically Integrated Projects Lunabotics course, students design, build and code an autonomous mining robot to participate in NASA's mining lunar competition each year. Students in the course work on research and development related to the competition guidelines. The purpose of the VIP Lunabotics course is to give undergraduate students an opportunity for a design-built test cycle as it's done in industry so that they get the same experience as they would be doing in their full-time jobs. I thought it was a great learning experience, especially in a way that will allow me to kind of use what we learn in our engineering courses, like theoretics and like an application. I wanted to participate in the VIP Lunabotics course because I wanted to get out of the classroom and do something that was hands-on and that would give me experience with real-life engineering design. I specifically chose Lunabotics because I'm personally extremely passionate about space exploration. That's what I want to work on. And of course it combined all the things I was passionate about, you know, robotics, lunar exploration, excavation, all sorts of things. I wanted to participate in the Lunabotics course because I knew I wanted to be part of the VIP team again. I've done it in the past and I've really enjoyed it. I've found it's a great way to earn credit, a different way from a traditional class. And the Lunabotics team just really stood out to me when I was looking at the list of teams. From the Lunabotics course, I'm learning a myriad of different things, but most notably I'm able to apply a bunch of different mechanical engineering concepts and incorporate them into my design. I have learned a ton from this course already and like I mentioned a little bit before, especially applying what we learn in our math and our physics classes, like the torque equations we're learning are exactly what we're applying in this course, except we expand and we go further and we dig deeper into it so that we can use it in our calculations. Some of the skills I've learned working on the team is how to manage tasks and to give them effectively to other members of my team and communicate really well with not only my team but other sub teams to make sure we're all working towards the same goal at the same time. My biggest goal for the students is to compete in the NASA Lunabotics competition each year and I also want them to learn skills that are transferable beyond graduation and in their personal lives. The NASA competition happens every year in May and students work throughout the year on their design and building of the robot. The competition happens at Kennedy Space Center and it includes universities from across the US. We're trying to make a completely new design from scratch for the NASA Lunar Excavation Program and we're trying to make an excavation and collection system to mine regolith in a simulated habitat and that concept, whatever we come up with, could potentially be used for future moon missions to actually mine and create settlements on the moon. What I enjoy most about instructing the VIP course is seeing students learn from each other, seeing them give feedback to each other on their teams and work together toward a common goal is what I most enjoy. I get to go to freshmen, explain them concepts not from a mathematical perspective but more from an intuitive sense which makes me better in my field and helps them understand what engineering is all about. The best thing about this course for me is that I get to experience real life engineering design, something that they do in industry and normally I wouldn't get an opportunity to do for probably four or five years down the road. Well, the best thing about this course for me is the fact that you get to experience such a diverse range of engineering aspects from manufacturing to design to brainstorming to working with a wide group of people that you just wouldn't get from a pure academic course. It's just that depth of experience that I really appreciate. If you're thinking about taking this course, I would highly recommend it because while it may not be 100% applicable to what you want to do in the future, there definitely will be something that you learn, whether it's just general concepts or more specific things that you'll use within your major. I think it's an amazing course to take. It's a course that really gets you involved and opens up your opportunities. It's a course that you start from the bottom and build so you don't need to have any pre-rex, you don't need to know anything. You learn as you go and it's an amazing learning experience. It's a lot more fun than your typical just sitting in class learning your equations because you're excited to make your robot work, you're excited to make your systems work, so the extra research doesn't seem like learning even though you learn a ton from it. It's such a fun time to be able to build things with my hands and instead of just sitting in a classroom all day and being bored, I get to make things and experiment and I've just had a blast. For me, the best thing about this course is actually getting to work with my team because it's something you don't get in a lot of classes, especially your freshman year. And us working as a team and everyone having something that they're really good at and having us all come together to make this amazing product is something that I love.