A 115-pound robot named Reboot rolled into Webster's elementary schools
Webster's high school robotics team, SparX, toured district elementary schools in June with Reboot, the 115-pound robot it rebuilt mid-season for this year's FIRST competition.
The robot can roll, climb, and play a version of basketball, and last week it did all three in front of some of Webster's youngest students.
Webster's high school robotics team, SparX, spent part of June bringing its 2026 competition robot, named Reboot, on a tour of district elementary schools. Students at Dewitt Road, Schlegel Road, and State Road elementary schools came face-to-face with the machine, and demonstrations at Klem North, Klem South, and Willink Middle School were scheduled to follow, according to webster on the web, which reported on the visits June 21.
SparX is FIRST Robotics Competition Team 1126, a program that has drawn students from both Webster Schroeder and Webster Thomas high schools since it was founded in 2002. The team built its competition robot in roughly six weeks for the 2026 season, then rebuilt the machine significantly between regional events and named the result Reboot. According to webster on the web, Reboot weighs about 115 pounds and can launch balls more than 10 feet into the air.
The robot was built for this year's FIRST Robotics Competition game, REBUILT presented by Haas. In the 2026 game, alliances of robots score foam balls called Fuel into goals, cross obstacles, and climb a tower before time runs out, which explains the rolling, shooting, and climbing the elementary students watched up close.
SparX competed at two regional competitions this spring. The team brought its original season robot to the Finger Lakes Regional at Rochester Institute of Technology in March, then rebuilt the machine into Reboot, which competed at the New York Tech Valley Regional at MVP Arena in Albany in April.
The elementary visits are a familiar tradition for high school robotics programs, which often bring competition robots into younger classrooms to spark early interest in science, technology, engineering, and math. For a seven-year-old watching a 115-pound machine sink a shot from across the gym, the pipeline from elementary curiosity to high school engineering starts with a single demonstration.
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