[Jon Stratis]

Man, with these questions, I'd love to see their database... :grin:

IF we can assume there is a database of some sorts that contains information like geographical location, team start date, team end date (for teams that are no longer around), and team level (FTC, FRC, even FLL and Jr. FLL), it would certainly be possible to write a program to determine "influence". For starters, group the teams by zip code and determine what was created first in that area - FRC or FTC. Then you can also compute data like the number of FRC teams present when the first FTC team registered, or vise-verse. Of course, this could be even more interesting if you had GPS coordinates for each team, then you could work off of number of miles difference very easily.

The harder question to answer is the second one. In my mind, the only one who can define overlap are those students who have participated in both FTC and FRC, and figuring the distance between those two teams (removing outliers where a student obviously moved to a different city/state across country)... and I'm pretty sure there's not a database with anything approaching a comprehensive list of that information.

For the sake of answering these questions from my team's perspective... we haven't really had much interaction with FTC at all, and none of our students have participated on an FTC team. That makes it really difficult to give him any meaningful feedback at all...