Dr. Suzanne Dietrich
Cooperative learning exercises are provided below for each animation (select links to download pdf). We recommend a full class discussion immediately following each cooperative exercise. Instructors can contact the project leaders to request the solutions to the exercises. Also, please explore the supporting resources provided on each visualization's Web page. We invite educators wishing to customize the animations to their discipline to contact us for information on the process. We would also like to hear from you if you are using the visualizations in your classes.
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Dr. Don Goelman
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Cooperative Learning Exercise: Introduction to Relational Databases
The cooperative exercise presents a spreadsheet of employees in departments and asks students to perform the following tasks within their group:
- identify any redundancy in the spreadsheet
- identify any anomalies (update, insert, delete) that may occur due to the redundancy
- propose a breakdown into multiple spreadsheets/tables to remove the redundancy, drawing the tables with the associated data
- for each table in the breakdown, identify its primary key
- for each table in the breakdown, identify any foreign keys
- for each table in the breakdown, create a question/query that can be answered using only that table
- for each primary‐foreign key relationship, create a question/query that can be answered using the relationship between the tables.
Cooperative Learning Exercise: Introduction to Querying
The cooperative learning exercise asks students to write queries involving:
- horizontal filtering only
- vertical filtering only
- horizontal and vertical filtering
- join only
- join with horizontal filtering
- join with horizontal and vertical filtering
using the Access database and a worksheet for recording their Access query.
The QBE interface of Access inherently supports the design aspect of answering a query and illustrates the primary-foreign key relationships. Note that the class discussion can compare the approaches used to answer the queries in Access and in SQL, comparing the SQL View in Access to the SQL solution.
If more practice of database querying is desired by the instructor, the students can explore the various queries presented in the animation using either Access or the SQL standard. The website includes resources for this exploration by supplying the Access database instance as well as the SQL standard statements for creating and populating the database. A document with numerous screenshots illustrates the Access QBE and SQL statements to answer each query.
Cooperative Learning Exercise: Conceptual Database Design
The database design cooperative exercise consists of 2 parts:
- Given requirements, draw an ER diagram
- Given an ER diagram, map it to a relational database schema
The requirements for drawing an ER diagram emphasize entites, relationships, and their corresponding cardinality and participation constraints. The ER diagram to map is not related to the requirements given in part 1. Note that in the class discussion, students can describe the requirements that are illustrated by the ER diagram to be mapped.