DataBase teaching tools

This paper is about how to improve the experience of students of the subject of database theory and practice, a subject many find somewhat daunting. It is by experiment that most scientists learn most about their discipline and in this paper the following ideas can be explored in simulations that in most cases use access to a database so that the exercises are personalised. The simulations are listed below. • Simple Entity-Relationship diagrams: Where simple Entity-Relationship diagrams can be composed from a set of components and their validity checked. • Entity-Relationships and tables that describe the entities: Where the student has to decide from tables of two entities the degree of participation and the participation conditions. With prompting the correct solution can be found and as many attempts as necessary are possible. • Structured Query Language (SQL): Given a database various SQL queries can input and the way that the queries are dealt with are shown in detail not just the final result. • Functional dependency: Given a table from a database this can used to find out whether there is any functional dependency between any of the columns and also to show what the primary key/s might be. • Normalisation: A topic that confuses may students. This allows table to be split into a number of sub-tables and the result can be tested as to whether the selected table can be joined together to form the original table. Each of these ideas has a simulation and these will be discussed in terms of how to run the simulation and explaining what the simulation is trying to teach. There are some third party software requirements and these will be explained together with the solution that is used for the demonstrations.