Grand Force, Grand Forks' only FIRST Robotics team, returns from world championship with good memories
Apr. 30—GRAND FORKS — Grand Forks' only FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics team is back from the world championship event, five years after the team's inception and on the cusp of two of the founding mentors heading out of North Dakota and two founding students graduating high school.
Sarah Dignan, lead mentor for the team, will nove to Virginia with her fiance and fellow mentor Derrick Seubert. While the two have plans to mentor virtually and hand off in-person mentoring to others, Dignan said she has mixed emotions about moving away from the team.
"I'm not ready to leave them, but I also know that they'll be fine without me," she said. "They can do it."
Grand Force, a team of five students and three college-aged mentors, came 33rd out of 75 in the Hopper division — named after mathematician and computer technology pioneer Grace Hopper — at the FIRST Championship, held in Houston, Texas, April 17-20. They were one of three teams from North Dakota that made it to the championship, the other two being from Hatton-Northwood and Fargo.
The theme of the game played this season focused on music, shooting "notes" into goals called "speakers" and "amps" to earn points. The team won the Innovation in Control Award and qualified for the world championship at a regional event in St. Cloud, Minnesota, when another team it was in an alliance with qualified twice. A team can't be qualified twice, so the qualification went to the next team in the form of a wild card. Grand Force received the card and thus was confirmed for going to the world event.
Dignan said everyone on the team was overwhelmed by the news and began to cry, and the excitement continued at the world championship when they saw teams they had been watching for years. They made friends with other teams and interacted with people from across the world. Some of the teams around Grand Force's pit at the event were from Turkey, China and Norway. The students also got a tour of the Houston team's build space, which housed every robot ever made by the local team.
"The students had so much fun," Dignan said. "They were so excited."
Grand Force was started in 2019 by Dignan and other UND students with the help of then-mayor Mike Brown, after they learned there wasn't a FIRST Robotics program in town. Dignan said the group knew the value of the program because it had led them into the career paths they were on.
"The program inspired me so much that I wanted to be a mentor for it," she said.
It was a challenge to recruit, as the team wasn't affiliated with a school, but that has also given the team freedom to work longer, which the students have done, she said. Two students come from Thompson and three are homeschooled.
One student, homeschooled senior Brylan Ringenberg, joined the program its first season after his mom suggested it to him. This season he served as the lead programmer, which he enjoyed as he is going into computer science at UND in the fall. Learning the team was going to the world championship was a shock, he said, and it was cool to see other well-known teams and talk with them. He is planning on being a mentor for the team in the future and hopes more students get involved.
"It's a really good program," he said. "You can learn something new every year. You can improve every year. ... It really challenges you and pushes you, and I really enjoyed that."
Another student who has been on the team for the past two years, Kaden Bittner, a junior from Thompson High School, will be learning programming to take over Ringenberg's role for the next season. While some luck was involved with making it to the championship, he said the team also put the work in with the goal of making it there. He is proud of the achievement, he said, since some other teams at the world event were made up of 50 to 80 members, and his team of five students were able to make it to the same level. To students who might be interested in robotics, Bittner encourages them to do so for the experience it will give them. His time in the program has made him more interested in going into engineering in college and being involved in STEM.
"The benefits that we'll have in the future like college, workforce and beyond ... I think they're probably more than anything else that you'll get in any other school activity," he said.
Dignan hopes the program lives on into the future and more people take advantage of the robotics opportunities in Grand Forks. She said if anyone is interested in joining Grand Force, they can email
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