Animated Courseware Support for Teaching Database Design

Abstract

Database technologies are a core component of computing technology curricula. Their importance will only continue to expand as more and more data are retained in database systems. An effective database system is predicated on a good data model. Database design is the conceptualization of an underlying data model that progresses from identifying user requirements to graphically depicting those requirements and finally mapping the graphical models to a set of tables implemented in a physical database system. The abstract nature of much of database design makes it challenging to teach. This paper presents a set of software animations designed to support the teaching of database design concepts. Topic areas covered include mapping problem descriptions to Entity Relationship (ER) diagrams, mapping ER diagrams to tables, normalization and denormalization and comparison of various ER notation sets. The animations are fairly intuitive to use and are independent of any specific database text or product. They are intended to provide supplemental instructional support and also provide students with additional learning opportunities.

An Approach to Solving Technical Difficulties Facing Non-CS Students in a Database Class

“…One example is WinRDBI [1], [2] that allows a student to interactively experiment with relational algebra, relational calculus, and SQL (Structured Query Language). Another example is ADbC (Animated Database Courseware) [3], [4] that interactively guides a student step by step through a particular database concept using hard-coded examples. ADbC covers a wide variety of database concepts including SQL, stored procedures and triggers, transactions, and database design.…”

The Effect of MySQL Workbench in Teaching Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) to Relational Schema Mapping

“…The diagram is then converted into a relational schema before the physical database is created and implemented. While it is challenging for novices to learn to design a database at the conceptual level due to the abstract and complex nature of data modeling [10,12,17,19,24], it is not an easy task mapping an ERD (Entity-Relational Diagram) to a relational schema. Even though it may seem straightforward to experienced database designers mapping an ERD to a relational schema, our over ten years' student performance record on database design shows that our CS students have not performed well on this topic.…”

“…Many students often mechanically follow the rules to perform the mapping without a clear understanding why they should map things a certain way. While memorizing or mechanically following the mapping rules may result in the temporary correct result, this kind of rote learning does not promote deep learning and understanding [24]. As a result, students often end up with incorrect relational schema after the initial class instruction.…”

“…Researchers have investigated the underlying obstacles to the problem [1,4,5,10,12,17,18,19,24]. The obstacles include students' poor understanding and conception of the problem domains, and abstract and complex relationships among entities etc.…”

“…To overcome the obstacles, researchers have investigated varied visualization tool-based support for learning ER modeling [12,16,17,21,22,24]. Visualization, playing an important role in learning and instruction, has been used in teaching programming and algorithms [6,7,8] and other topics in Computer Science.…”