This project tackles a real-world example of a classroom with college students to discover what factors affect a student’s outcome in the class as well as investigate when and why a student who started well in the semester may end poorly later on. First, this project performs a statistical analysis to ensure that the total score of a student is truly based on the factors given in the dataset instead of due to random chance. Next, factors that are the most significant in affecting the outcome of scores in zyBook assignments are discovered. Thirdly, visualization of how students perform over time is displayed for the student body as a whole and students who started well at the beginning of the semester but trailed off towards the end. Lastly, the project also gives insight into the failure metrics for good starter students who unfortunately did not perform as well later in the course.

In the basketball world, perhaps one of the most sought-after feelings is that of momentum. Basketball players, coaches, analysts, and fans alike are all too familiar with the idea that a “team has momentum” during a stretch of time, or that the team needs to do something to “generate their own momentum”. In a game that appears to be an accumulation of independent possessions, what exactly does momentum really mean? My goal was to see if there is a way to quantify momentum in an NBA game, particularly by looking at the Phoenix Suns 2021-2022 NBA season.

College athletics are a multi-billion dollar industry featuring hard-working student-athletes competing at a high level for national championships across a variety of different sports. Across the college sports landscape, coaches and players are always seeking an edge they can gain in order to obtain a competitive advantage over their opponents. While this may sound nefarious, the vast amounts of data about these games and student-athletes can be used to glean insights about the sports themselves in order to help student-athletes be more successful. Data analytics can be used to make sense of the available data by creating models and using other tools available that can predict how student-athletes and their teams will do in the future based on the data gathered from how they have performed in the past. Colleges and universities across the country compete in a vast array of sports. As a result of these differences, the sports with the largest amounts of data available will be the more popular college sports, such as football, men’s and women’s basketball, baseball and softball. Arizona State University, as a member of the Pac-12 conference, has a storied athletic tradition and decades of history in all of these sports, providing a large amount of data that can be used to analyze student-athlete success in these sports and help predict future success. However, data is available from numerous other college athletic programs that could provide a much larger sample to help predict with greater accuracy why certain teams and student-athletes are more successful than others. The explosion of analytics across the sports world has resulted in a new focus on utilizing statistical techniques to improve all aspects of different sports. Sports science has influenced medical departments, and model-building has been used to determine optimal in-game strategy and predict the outcomes of future games based on team strength. It is this latter approach that has become the focus of this paper, with football being used as a subject due to its vast popularity and massive supply of easily accessible data.

College athletics are a multi-billion dollar industry featuring hard-working student-athletes competing at a high level for national championships across a variety of different sports. Across the college sports landscape, coaches and players are always seeking an edge they can gain in order to obtain a competitive advantage over their opponents. While this may sound nefarious, the vast amounts of data about these games and student-athletes can be used to glean insights about the sports themselves in order to help student-athletes be more successful. Data analytics can be used to make sense of the available data by creating models and using other tools available that can predict how student-athletes and their teams will do in the future based on the data gathered from how they have performed in the past. Colleges and universities across the country compete in a vast array of sports. As a result of these differences, the sports with the largest amounts of data available will be the more popular college sports, such as football, men’s and women’s basketball, baseball and softball. Arizona State University, as a member of the Pac-12 conference, has a storied athletic tradition and decades of history in all of these sports, providing a large amount of data that can be used to analyze student-athlete success in these sports and help predict future success. However, data is available from numerous other college athletic programs that could provide a much larger sample to help predict with greater accuracy why certain teams and student-athletes are more successful than others. The explosion of analytics across the sports world has resulted in a new focus on utilizing statistical techniques to improve all aspects of different sports. Sports science has influenced medical departments, and model-building has been used to determine optimal in-game strategy and predict the outcomes of future games based on team strength. It is this latter approach that has become the focus of this paper, with football being used as a subject due to its vast popularity and massive supply of easily accessible data.

Visualizations can be an incredibly powerful tool for communicating data. Data visualizations can summarize large data sets into one view, allow for easy comparisons between variables, and show trends or relationships in data that cannot be seen by looking at the raw data. Empirical information and by extension data visualizations are often seen as objective and honest. Unfortunately, data visualizations are susceptible to errors that may make them misleading. When visualizations are made for public audiences that do not have the statistical training or subject matter expertise to identify misleading or misrepresented data, these errors can have very negative effects. There is a good deal of research on how best to create guidelines for creating or systems for evaluating data visualizations. Many of the existing guidelines have contradicting approaches to designing visuals or they stress that best practices depend on the context. The goal of this work is to define the guidelines for making visualizations in the context of a public audience and show how context-specific guidelines can be used to effectively evaluate and critique visualizations. The guidelines created here are a starting point to show that there is a need for best practices that are specific to public media. Data visualization for the public lies at the intersection of statistics, graphic design, journalism, cognitive science, and rhetoric. Because of this, future conversations to create guidelines should include representatives of all these fields.