Aims

The course provides foundational knowledge for understanding, representing, and analyzing data, with a focus on the sports domain and applied use of Microsoft Excel. Students distinguish between raw data and structured information, explore how data is stored, encoded, and compressed, and apply this knowledge to real-world cases using spreadsheets.

Teacher

• Michael Soprano — Course Leader

I design and teach the course, which includes 12 lectures totaling 24 hours. Assessment is based on a written exam.

Topics Covered

• Data and information in the context of sports
• Populations, variables, and scales of measurement
• Data storage, encoding, and representation
• Representing text, images, audio, and video
• Shannon-Weaver model, entropy, redundancy
• Data compression: lossless and lossy
• Excel: interface, data entry, formatting
• Managing cells, ranges, rows, and columns
• Tables, references, navigation shortcuts
• Formulas and functions in Excel
• Data import and manipulation
• Creating and managing line, area, and scatter charts
• Introduction to PivotTables for structured analysis

Learning Approach

The course emphasizes clarity and practical understanding through examples and case studies from the sports domain. Students work directly with Excel to apply key concepts in data representation, transformation, and visualization.