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Who are we?
The “Troopers” are an elite robotics team based in El Paso, Texas. Along with the honor of being the first team in our city to attend VEX Worlds 2015, we have had the privilege of attending Worlds for five years in a row.
Our own Team 8787 made finals in the Online Google Girl Powered Story, won the online Game Design Challenge Award, and received the Teamwork Award. Mr. Torres, our mentor, received the Volunteer of the Year Award in 2017.
We aim to not only be great competitors in the VEX Robotics Competition but also to share our knowledge of STEM to our local community. It is our pleasure to host robotics workshops at feeder schools, school districts, and local businesses.
We have begun hosting Girl Powered events open to girls across the West Texas area. We broke record after record with unprecedented success. In 2016, our first time hosting, we brought in over 350 aspiring young girls, making our event the largest in the nation. The next year, we had 450. By 2018 and 2019, we saw attendance upwards of 700 and broke the world record for largest Girl Powered event. We are thrilled to continue inspiring ever more girls to pursue the STEM field.
our goals
Our goal is to foster the development of life skills such as responsibility, teamwork, leadership, and determination through hands-on experience. We strive to serve our community by granting opportunities to improve and help students pursue their dreams in the STEM field. As El Paso’s finest, we emphasize community outreach as much as we value our competitive success.
EHS Robotics Competition History
In August of 2014, the fledgling Eastwood Robotics Club took its first tentative steps. The team chose the Star Wars Clone Trooper as its mascot in alignment with Eastwood High's mascot: The Trooper. Due to an initial lack of funds, the robotics team created their first team shirts themselves, by (how we actually made them). Despite our first-year status, we scored 4th place in the NMSU BEST robotics competition and competed in the FTC competition of El Paso, TX. Importantly, after tasting success, we began to invest in equipment and knowledge to better prepare ourselves next year.
Sky rise 2015
In 2015, the Troopers participated in both the NMBEST and FTC competitions; additionally, we decided to try our hand at the VEX EDR robotics competition. Thus, Team 8787 was born, and grew rapidly. Through a blessing of equipment, knowledge, talent, and determination led us to win the 2015 West Texas VEX Excellence Award. As the first team to ever achieve this accomplishment in El Paso history, we were overwhelmed with joy. After the rush of Louisville, Kentucky, we returned home with invaluable experience, an undying passion, and bountiful optimism for the years to come.
Nothing but Net 2016
In 2016, we decided to focus on VEX EDR. The team grew in numbers and commitment. We gained enough members to sponsor multiple teams: 8787A, 8787B, and a third all-girls team: 8787C. With an insatiable hunger for the year's Kentucky’s VEX Competition, we were set on getting tickets in the VEX World Championship. (8787A won Tournament Champions, 8787C won tournament champions and excellence) At Worlds, team 8787C won the Teamwork Award, inspiring us to grow only more ambitious. The team continued to grow, and more eager hearts joined us in our goal of learning and expanding student's abilities.
Starstruck 2017
The Eastwood Troopers continued to excel in the VRC. Motivated to make a mark internationally, we heavily invested in integrating different technology and building more sophisticated robots. Our twenty-seven members were divided into four teams; we had the biggest robotics club in our city. Then, at the West Texas State Championship, the Eastwood Troopers did it once again. For the fourth year as a club, we obtained two tickets to World’s from the Excellence Award, the third year in a row, as well as the VRC Game Design Animation Challenge.
in the zone 2018
We started a little rough. The previous year most of the seniors of First Original Team 8787 graduated. As if that heartbreak wasn’t enough, our entire school was torn down for construction and we went under construction and we were without a work space for most of the summer. Nonetheless, we continued to reach out to our community and in the fall, we worked twice as hard and thankfully, this 2018 season we continued to be one of El Paso’s finest robotics clubs. With time management and ambition, all teams won awards locally and state level. We had accomplished getting the Excellence Award and we ended up heading off to Louisville, Kentucky for the fifth time in a row. At the end of the competition we left home with our most prized position, the Design Award and with the motivation to work hard so we can get the Excellence Award.
Turning Point 2019
This year we started off stronger than ever, even though we lost many of our members from the previous year. We pushed through many tough challenges, such as not having a school for another year, having to learn new skills to succeed, and to go above our own expectations for this coming competition. This year we were able to raise funds for the largest Girl Power event, with a total of over 700 girls attending (although if it wasn’t for out venues capacity restrictions we could have had many more), at the University of Texas at El Paso .Its sad that not every girl could go ,but made us realize how every year we have influenced many young women to come join us and for that reason we realized that we should expand to a larger facility, so we are able to have everyone there to come celebrate women in the STEM field.
