Okay, so I was asked to put this together for work, but I'm so impressed with how it came out, I wanted to share it. Besides that, I think it's a really great way to show the impact of FIRST in a completely new way.
I spent the past four days making a graphical map analysis of NY by plotting all the FIRST Robotics (FRC) teams in the state versus the top 10 most-populated cities. It's interactive. And it's pretty cool. So check it out.
It functions just the way maps on Google do. Blue markers represent teams, red markers represent major cities. You can click on every marker and see the school and team number associated with them. Same for cities, the marker will tell you what city it represents (with approx. populations). I included a list of the high schools and cities in the upper right corner of the map too, for easy maneuverability.
http://www.nycnjfirst.org/ny_map.htm
For anyone who wants to make their own:
I used the website
MultiPlotter to create the map. The instructions for putting the map on your own website are right on the homepage, and they're really easy to follow.
For addresses, I took the list of teams in the state (which you can find by going to the "What's going on in my area?" section of the FIRST website, and checked the long team name for each team. Most of them had high schools listed, or at least school districts. The ones that didn't I used their hometowns to narrow down my search.
The nice part of searching out the addresses is the Department of Education provides a list of all the high schools in the state (most states have their own DOE site where you can find this information). I used Google to find the NY State DOE website. Check under "Resources for Administration/Educators" if you can't find the listing easily.
For my map, I created an excel spreadsheet of teams with their high schools and towns. Then I searched the DOE spreadsheet for the high school, and copied the address to a separate text file. Plugged all the addresses into MultiPlotter, and Voila! New interactive multi-point map.
My only suggestion is double-check your addresses, plug them into Google Maps and make sure they come up. I had a few problems with this at first, but I narrowed it down pretty quickly. If MultiPlottr still has problems finding the address, try plugging in the Latitude and Longitude, which you can find for anywhere in the world by going to
Maporama.
Feel free to leave comments/questions. And let me know if you have any suggestions for things I should add or edit to my own map!