Supporting Northern California Youth! Let’s get FLL everywhere – starting with your neighbors!
One of the ongoing queries that we get is how to help FLL spread – this is particularly true coming from our FTC and FRC teams.
In general, if you look at the states / areas that have a good density of FIRST LEGO League Challenge teams, we see on average about 100 teams per 1 million residents – let’s call that the goal.
Let’s look at some data for FLL Challenge teams across the largest Northern California counties.
| County | Population | 2024 Reg Teams | Goal |
| Santa Clara County | 1,926,000 | 239 | 192 |
| Alameda County | 1,649,000 | 179 | 164 |
| Sacramento County | 1,611,000 | 35 | 161 |
| Contra Costa County | 1,173,000 | 36 | 117 |
| San Francisco County | 827,500 | 31 | 82 |
| San Joaquin County | 816,100 | 18 | 81 |
| San Mateo County | 742,800 | 48 | 74 |
| Stanislaus County | 556,900 | 2 | 55 |
| Sonoma County | 485,300 | 3 | 48 |
| Solano County | 455,100 | 2 | 45 |
| Monterey County | 436,200 | 10 | 43 |
| Placer County | 433,800 | 4 | 43 |
As you can see, only 2 counties meet the goal. Some counties are very far away from the goal.
If we drill down a bit into the top city of the top 2 counties – Santa Clara and Alameda – a bit, we can see several areas that are very unrepresented.
| County | Largest City | Population | 2024 Reg Teams | Goal |
| Santa Clara | San Jose | 943,212 | 94 | 94 |
| Alameda | Oakland | 433,544 | 20 | 43 |
San Jose is doing okay – it is right at the goal.
Now let’s drill down into each city into the top 5 population areas by zip code.
| San Jose Zip Codes (largest by population) | Population | 2024 Reg Teams | Goal |
| 95122 | 52,206 | 2 | 5 |
| 95116 | 48,816 | 0 | 4 |
| 95118 | 31,831 | 1 | 3 |
| 95131 | 30,745 | 2 | 3 |
| 95130 | 13,491 | 0 | 1 |
| Oakland Zip Codes (largest by population) | Population | 2024 Reg Teams | Goal |
| 94601 | 52,289 | 0 | 5 |
| 94606 | 38,746 | 1 | 3 |
| 94603 | 36,440 | 1 | 3 |
| 94621 | 34,658 | 1 | 3 |
| 94602 | 31,450 | 0 | 3 |
None of the top 5 largest zip code areas of these cities come close to hitting their goal.
So if you want to help FLL spread – let’s first focus on our neighbors! Let me know at fll-challenge @ playingatlearning dot org if you need the data for your city/county.
