pic: Spread of US FIRST Teams

[Damian Manda]

This thread was closed for a while yesterday, so sorry it took a while to respond. Thanks everyone for the great response. Many great ideas have been thrown out and I would like to do more myself when I have time. As for a larger area, it would have looked too sparse on a world map (lets change that!) and one grading criteria was good density of data. I also didn't include Alaska and Hawaii for space reasons, but have the data and it would be easy to add.

To answer a few people's questions, from the original shapefile that I created, the points were manipulated to spread them out in high density areas so that most points are visible (although I probably missed a few that are still stacked). As noted some teams are in the wrong place (there is a dot for each team). When the cities were georeferenced, some ended up in the completely wrong places, so I actually repeated the process 4 times and took the average of the ones that matched, but even
then, I manually corrected a few and am sure there are some that did not map correctly. It would be fairly straightforward to show team numbers, since that was integrated as a field into the shapefile for the GIS, but the high density areas would be difficult to show in a way that all could be visible and readable, but I will see what I can do. I looked quickly for lego league data, but couldn't find any easily, but I think maps of the other competitions would be cool as well. Also, the percentages are of total employment in each state to answer that question.

Anyone is welcome to use this for materials promoting or explaining FIRST or any other purpose you see fit. That is one of the reasons I wanted to share this in the first place, I was sure some people could find uses for it. I would appreciate if you left on my name, but other than that feel free distribute the map.