Hagerty Robotics Coaches & Mentors
Po Dickison
Mrs. Dickison is the Media Specialist at Hagerty High School. She was part of the Inaugural opening staff in 2005 and has over 18 years of experience in education. She has presented at the state and national level conferences on topics of educational technology, online learning, media literacy, and teacher professional development. She is the original founder of Hagerty Robotics in 2010! In addition to her role as a coach, she is the school’s Testing Coordinator and is in charge of ensuring all testing in the school is run efficiently! She also helps with the Robotics Initiative for Seminole County Public Schools. She loves all things robotics, the students, and encourages the program to reach for world championships. She is the glue that keeps us all together!
Stefan Ibarguen
Mr. Ibarguen is the main coach for our VEX teams! He left his job as a software engineer at the Symantec Corporation to make a difference by teaching programming to high school students. After three years of teaching, he retired from Hagerty. Currently he is a coach for the Robotics Program. He helps students when they hit a wall with programming and guides students to find solutions on their own. His calm demeanor helps us all focus and stay on task. He makes sure we have check lists for each event so that we don’t forget anything for an event! In addition to coaching, he helps with driving team members to events. We are so happy to have Mr. Ibarguen as a coach as we can rely on his field of expertise from the business side!
Jaynelle Miller
Ms. Miller is 4717's Coach and our Program's Communications/Engineering Notebook Mentor. This is her eleventh year mentoring an FTC team, her seventh mentoring Hagerty Robotics. Ms. Miller works for the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation. With STEM playing an ever increasing role in our everyday lives, Ms. Miller felt it was important to encourage her kids and other youth to participate in FIRST programs. She loves mentoring and learning right alongside the youth. In her free time, Ms. Miller enjoys running, gardening, sewing, and spending time outdoors with her family.
Steven Yun
Mr. Yun is 4227's Coach and has assisted Hagerty Robotics Program as a mentor since 2019. He is a graduate from UCF with a masters in electrical engineering. He is also the president of Burns Technologies located in the Central Florida Research Park. When he is not busy running a small business, he can be found helping the students build their robots. Being a mentor and volunteer in the FIRST programs has allowed him to give back to his community all the while finding joy in that of teaching students. Mr. Yun enjoys seeing these young adults grow to become the next engineers and scientists of tomorrow.
Don Harper
Mr. Harper has assisted the Hagerty Robotics Program as a mentor since 2011. He didn’t even have any children attending our school then! He works at UCF’s College of Engineering. Mr. Harper loves challenges, especially with robotics. He made a driverless car out of his wife’s car, which made it to the finals of the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007, and was on the BattleBots TV Show. He introduced the team to the Mini Urban Challenge in 2011 where our school placed 2nd at the National Competition. He helps us design using PTC Creo, build, and program the robot using RobotC and Java. He also helps drive the students to competitions and outreach events. He spends many hours each day, even on the weekends, assisting us with our robots. He won Tesla Robotics League’s Mentor of the Year in 2013. Mr. Harper has a wealth of knowledge and is always ready and willing to teach us. We are lucky to have him as our mentor as he provides us access to UCF’s Innovation Lab where we can use laser cutters, 3-D printers, and other tools to make parts for our robot.