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Saturday, November 25th, 2023, 9am-1pm

Warren G. Harding High School

Team E.L.I.T.E. 48 will compete at the 2023 FIRST Buckeye Regional March 30th – April 1st.

Catch all the action on the webcast at these links: https://www.twitch.tv/firstinspires7 & https://www.twitch.tv/firstinspires8

We’ll add more information to this post as it becomes available.

Warren’s Team E.L.I.T.E. 48 and Team 379, the Girard RoboCats, competed this weekend at the Midwest Regional in Chicago, IL. The event had 46 teams from Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, and as far away as Ankara, Turkey, to name a few.

Team E.L.I.T.E. (Encouraging Learning In Technology and Engineering) went 5W-6L in qualification rounds seeding 24th while the RoboCats went 7W-4L seeding 13th. During alliance selection, the RoboCats became the 8th alliance captain and selected Team E.L.I.T.E. and team 2013, the Cybergnomes, from Ontario, Canada. During the double elimination rounds, the RoboCats alliance went 3W-2L and finished the event ranked 3rd.

Both the RoboCats and Team E.L.I.T.E. will now return home to iterate on their creations and meet again at the Buckeye Regional, March 30-April 1, and the Pittsburgh Regional, April 6-8. If either qualifies during those events, they will advance to the FIRST World Championship in Houston, TX, April 19-22.

The teams compete in the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition which challenges High School students from around the world to build a new robot each year to compete in a new challenge. Teams are given roughly 6 weeks to design, protype, build, program, and test their robots before competing at events.

Gianna Jones WGH Class of 2018     

We at Team 48 would like to give a shout-out and acknowledge an alumnus who has made an amazing and notable achievement on her post-graduate road to success.

Gianna Jones was a member of our robotics team from 2015 – 2017. Among her many contributions, she faithfully served as a Safety Escort, Safety Mascot Escort, Safety Mascot (“Safety Sith” / “Darth Safety”) and Safety Co-Captain.  Gianna holds the distinction of being the 2^nd female team member to wear the Darth Safety mascot uniform but the first, and currently, only female student to wear it at an actual regular season FRC competition.  While serving as our team’s Safety Co-Captain, Safety Vader mascot and event volunteer during the2017 Miami Valley Regional, Gianna helped present our program to the Underwriter’s Laboratories Safety Advisors and officially launched our Safety Varsity Letter award.  At our team’s end-of-season celebration and awards banquet, Gianna was one of the first Team 48 students to receive this prestigious award.

Currently, Gianna is a student at Youngstown State University working toward a Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing and a Minor in Graphic Design.  She is also currently employed on The Simpsons animated television show and, as of this current Season #33, Gianna has had her name added to the closing credits of the show as one of the Animation Production Assistants!  You can see her name at the bottom section of the last full page of the closing credits.

Congratulations from your proud Team 48 robo-family for all of your current success and all that you will continue to achieve. You were an awesome student to have mentored and you are a credit to the hard work, dedication and talent that our team fosters.  Thank you for being an inspiration to the past, present and future generations of young women pursuing their dreams through STEM and STEAM education.

~Humbly submitted by Donnell Conner

Hey team. I just wanted to share with you how proud I am of team we’re building.
I was talking with a friend a few nights ago about our team and when I think back over these past 3 1/2 years, I’m amazed at what we’ve accomplished together. And that’s all on top of the climb that we’ve been making over the past 25 years. Even just looking at this year. We were down to 5-7 returning students after Covid did it’s damage. This summer we added a few more students to our ranks and began work on a development mule of a robot, testing out new to us, innovative solutions. Then we welcomed two mentors that are actively training students in their respective specialties. (Jon’s been around, but we made it official this year.) That’s in addition to the teaching that our alumni and seasoned mentors are doing.
The surprise that I was clearly not prepared for was the avalanche of new student interest. We quickly jumped from 9 to 45 students and all we did was run an announcement on WSCN and send an invitation to a few students that showed interest through various avenues. That number fluctuates almost daily as expected, but we’ve got about 30 or so students that are active on the team at this point. Another surprise came in the form of the District allowing us to host MVRC this year. Thanks in large part to Travis and Andy Yantes we, along with our army of volunteers, put on a top notch event and totally crushed the construction and demolition of the Infinite Recharge playing field. We fielded two robots this year and our main robot, XM23, seeded 7th of 17. It was pretty cool to see our development mule (9999/XM24) be apart of the winning alliance. XM24 really came together in the last two weeks before the competition. Thank you to those of you that had a hand in finishing our summer project.
It seems that we have quite a bit of parent support this year too. This is still an area of development over the next few months, but I’m optimistic that we’ll have even more robust parent support soon. On the sponsor front, we’ve received two nice sized sponsorships this year that we were totally not expecting. Ty Hamrick acquired the sponsorship of his mother’s company. The best part of that is that he read the team manual and took it upon himself to send out sponsorship letters.
And then comes the culmination of our journey so far. We were given permission to not only travel to an out of state, offseason competition. We were allowed to make it an overnight stay and were given guidance on how we could keep our traditional rooming arrangements while still keeping our students as safe as possible. This trip was essentially a test to work out the bugs of traveling before we take a larger team. Once again, in the last week leading up to this competition our team rallied together to get XM23 in the best shape it’s been in two years. We traveled to Rochester, NY for Rah Cha Cha Ruckus with 15 team members. We seeded 9th out of 25 and then became the 7th alliance captain. Our newly trained scouts gave us a terrific pick list and we played a few more matches before being eliminated. The students learned so much during that trip and they had a lot of fun. We ate well, we made new friendships, and we even spent some time in nature. Upon returning home, it was evident that we had just completed something very special and many of the mentors walked away with a renewed sense of inspiration and optimism for the upcoming season.
Can you believe that it’s only been a few months and we’ve accomplished this much? I’m sure that I’m even missing some significant milestones. All of this to say, I’m grateful for each and every one of you that had a hand in these accomplishments. There is no I in this team. This, as my friend said, is truly a team effort. I look forward to what the rest of this season will bring.

The following photos were taken by Team 48’s own, Adam Reed:

Warren G. Harding’s FIRST Robotic’s Team 48 hosted the much anticipated, in-person Mahoning Valley Robotics Challenge on Sunday, October 17, 2021. Following district guidelines, only the competitors and their advisors attended the event which included 17 teams from Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Click HERE for the full story!