We’re putting together a bunch of data to figure out where to start teams in our region, and what type. It’s a complex issue, so we are starting with some basic data and building on that.
Before we go through the trouble of putting some statistics together, I was wondering if something like this has been done before: How many FIRST (and, for that matter, other types of robotics teams) in each state? How about the distribution compared to a population density map (probably zip code resolution is good enough).
I’d really be interested in seeing how something like that breaks down for a place like Michigan (with 2739 teams in all FIRST programs last year, plus Vex teams, etc), too.
If no one has that info, I’m going to work on it with some students and we’ll report back what we find. Should be interesting.
The data FIRST provides for FRC teams through the FRC Events API (and through The Blue Alliance subsequently) contains state and province data, as well as resident city of record, though that’s not necessarily an exclusive area of service indicative of demographics. FIRST Tech Challenge has some (but not all) data of similar type on The Orange Alliance, but for FLL Jr, FLL, and FLL Jr. Discovery Edition we have no official datasource the community can officially use.
As for other programs, open ended questions rarely end well. VEXDB.io exists for VRC and VEXU teams, and Robotevents.com seems to have an API internally to generate the team map, but I couldn’t find one more specific for the VIQ team data.
In short: It’s been tried before, there’s no magic bullet. The problem has lots of nuance… If you want to do state by state analysis it’s totally plausible, more granular data is gonna be very hit or miss.
Thanks. The Team and Events search page has zip codes for all programs but that doesn’t seem very easy to scrape. The old usfirst.org one was a lot easier. This one looks like either a lot of manual cut-and-paste or serious javascript hacking to reverse engineer, which probably breaks some terms of service.
İstanbul has one FRC team for every 228.000 people. I don’t know how many FLL / FLL Jr. teams we have though.
Sinop has one for every 31.000 people. I know they have at least 2 FLL Teams up there, so that would bring the overall to like 1 team per 18.000 people. Probably they have more than 2 FLL Teams though.