Boston Marathon

MicroProject Overview

The Boston Marathon is an annual marathon hosted by several cities in greater Boston in eastern Massachusetts, United States, held on Patriots' Day, the third Monday of April. Considered one of the world's oldest and most prestigious marathons, it attracts runners from all over the globe to participate in its challenging course.

The SCORE Sports Data Repository is a curated collection of datasets across various sports, designed for use in statistics and data science education. This repository encourages exploration and analysis, organized by sport and educational topic, and is funded by the National Science Foundation​ (ScoreNetwork)​.

We will be analyzing the 2023 Boston Marathon runners dataset in this microproject. In addition to the 2023 dataset, we will be analyzing datasets 2000 and 2010. These datasets are pulled from Boston-Marathon-Data-Project, a public GitHub repository containing Boston Marathon data from 1897-2019.

First Time Doing a MicroProject?

Each MicroProject starts with a notebook that we provide to you to get started! You will need to configure a git repository to connect to our `microprojects` remote where we release the starter notebook.

Fetch the Initial Files

In your terminal, navigate to your GitHub repository and merge the initial files by running the following commands:

git fetch microprojects
git merge microprojects/microproject-boston-marathon --allow-unrelated-histories -m "Merging initial files"

Complete the Notebook

If the commands above were successful, you have merged in the initial files to start on the MicroProject.

  • Find the new microproject-boston-marathon folder.
  • Open microproject-boston-marathon.ipynb and complete the MicroProject!

Commit and Grade Your Notebook

Once you have finished your notebook, you must use the built-in GitHub Action to preform automated grading of your MicroProject notebook! You will need to commit your work and then manually run the GitHub Action.

Commit Your Work

To commit your notebook, run the standard git commands in your terminal:

git add -u
git commit -m "microproject completed"
git push

Grade Your Notebook

To grade your notebook, you will need to visit your GitHub repository in your browser.

  • Visit your GitHub repository in your browser
  • Click on the "Actions" tab
  • Under "Workflows", find the workflow for this microproject
  • Click the "Run Workflow" in the blue box, and then the green "Run Workflow"
  • After about 10 seconds, you should see a new job that has started running
    • You can click on the job to watch it run in real-time
    • It will take ~1 minute to run and grade
  • Once the running is complete, the autograding summary will be available!