Customizing a custom front page from a pre-purchased theme

I purchased a theme, and it has a custom front page. I see how I can manually edit the myhome.php file to add content to that page, but I do not want to do that. I would prefer that it pull the articles from a specific category to put online so that it is easier to change from the word press control panel in the future.

The code is below, is there a way to replace this code with a loop and call of articles from a specific category with a thumbnail (it is currently online at https://charterschoolcorp.org if you want to take a look), or am I better off just manually editing the .php file?

Thanks!

[code moderated - the forum limit is 10 lines of code]