prediction-probability-and-pigskin

Repository of course materials for COLL C-105: Prediction, Probability, and Pigskin, a course taught at Indiana University (2012-2014). Course materials posted here were last updated during the Fall 2014 semester. Some of the materials may bear a copyright symbol, but these are overridden by the GPL v.3 license applied to this repository. See master/LICENSE for more details. The most current syllabus is C105_Syllabus_16354.pdf. Additional contents of the repository are listed below...

1. /admin ... Contains the original course proposal (which, it should be noted, did not describe the course in its final form), and a polite letter to Roger Goodell. The fact that he didn't respond to me (or to any of the similar letters that my students wrote to him) is a major aspect of why I'm no longer teaching this course.
2. /exams ... Contains the midterm and final exams, as well as study guides provided to students.
3. /lab-activities ... Weekly lab activities, which took place in an instructional computer laboratory in two groups of 30 students. The first week's laboratory was the fantasy draft. The 14th week was a simulation exercise which is not included in this repository, and the 15th week was open office hours to assist student preparation for the final exam.
4. /lectures ... Contains weekly PowerPoint lecture slides, and sometimes supporting materials.
5. /paper-and-presentation-at-gls ... I gave a presentation about the course at the annual meeting of GLS (Games+Learning+Society) in Madison, Wisconsin, in 2013. This folder contains the paper and slides presented at the conference.
6. /scraping ... A core feature of C105 was that students had access to up-to-date well-organized football data. This dataset was created by scraping (using Python scripts and relying heavily on the BeautifulSoup library) HTML pages downloaded from ESPN.com. There's a readme file in the scraping folder that gives more context.

This repository does not include the required readings, many of which are copyrighted and were only available through IU library access. This repository also does not include the dataset produced by the scraping tools, which is too big for Github (plus, I happen to've misplaced it).

I hope this is helpful to you. I do not intend to maintain or update this repository. I had a good run with C105.