Illini Football

MicroProject Overview

The University of Illinois' Fighting Illini Historical Football Scores Dataset contains a "collection of final scores of every known Fighting Illini football game since 1892, with data on location, homecoming, and national bowl games." In this MicroProject, you will explore the history of Illini football games through row selection, data groups, and creating basic data visualization.

Data Science Skills

In this microproject, you will explore the Illini Football Scores of every game since 1892 and strengthen the following Data Science skills:

  • Loading a DataFrame in from a CSV file with pd.read_csv
  • Finding the largest and smallest records in a dataset using df.nlargest and df.nsmallest
  • Grouping rows together using either df.groupby or df.pivot_table
  • Creating a bar chart in pandas with df.plot.bar

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-illini-football-scores --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-illini-football-scores folder.
  • Open microproject-illini-football-scores.ipynb and complete the MicroProject!

Commit and Grade Your Notebook

Once you have finished your notebook, you can 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"/li>
  • 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!