FIRST Indiana Robotics was constantly fielding location-based questions about their teams and events—and answering them manually, one spreadsheet at a time. We built the Atlas to give them one place to hold all of that data and actually use it.

Technology Stack

A lot of scattered data, a lot of manual work

FIRST Indiana Robotics planning committees were regularly asking questions like: where are our teams located? Where should we host events? Which teams are within 50 miles of a potential sponsor? These aren’t unusual questions—but they were being answered through guesswork, estimations, and manually copying addresses into mapping tools one by one.

Data lived in different spreadsheets in different formats. Any time someone needed an answer, they were largely starting fresh. The work wasn’t reusable, and the results weren’t always reliable.

One place for everything

The Atlas consolidates team data, school information, and event sites into a single system. Data comes in through spreadsheet imports, the FIRST website’s own APIs, and manual entry—however it exists, there’s a path in.

Pre-built reports translate the raw data into answers to the questions that kept coming up. For more advanced needs, there’s an interface for building custom MongoDB aggregation pipelines directly in the browser, so staff can answer new questions without needing to involve a developer every time.

From guessing to knowing

Planning committees now have quick access to accurate, centralized data instead of starting from scratch with each question. Manual data entry and the errors that came with it have dropped significantly, and data that gets entered stays useful—it doesn’t have to be re-entered somewhere else when the next question comes up.

More than anything, it’s changed how decisions get made: from “I’m not sure, let me check around” to pulling up the Atlas and having an answer.