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The Proceedings of the Information Systems Education Conference 2005: §2565
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| | Fri, Oct 7, 4:00 - 4:25, House A Paper (refereed)
| | Recommended Citation: McMaster, K, N Anderson, and D Bilyeu-Dittman. A Reverse Life-Cycle Database Course with Mini-Projects. In The Proceedings of the Information Systems Education Conference 2005, v 22 (Columbus OH): §2565. ISSN: 1542-7382.
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A Reverse Life-Cycle Database Course with Mini-Projects
The usual approach to teaching an introductory database course--as presented in curriculum guidelines from professional societies, in database textbooks, and in papers and presentations--is to sequence the topics according to the database development life-cycle. Students proceed from data modeling to database design to database implementation and operations. In this approach, students are often assigned a semester-long project, where they perform life-cycle activities to develop a single database system. In this paper, some problems with the life-cycle approach are discussed, and an alternative reverse life-cycle approach is suggested. With the reverse life-cycle approach, students begin by performing operations on existing databases, and then learn how to implement their own databases. Data modeling and design topics are delayed until students become familiar with database systems. Instead of a semester-long project, students are given a sequence of mini-projects, where each mini-project involves activities within one stage of database development.
Keywords: database, life-cycle, data modeling, entity-relationship model, relational model, database design, SQL
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