Report on the DB2 course
February 24th, 2007 by xavier
Like the previous post, this one also aims at showing the matter we saw during the three-week intensive course of database 1.
That way, the next teacher coming from Madrid or whatsoever may know from where will he have to start.
Technorati Tags: burundi, database, ngozi, tedeco
I had to teach this course to the third year students. But they almost didn’t have any practise so far!
So, I’ve oriented to course to a more practical one.
Eventually, the name of the course doesn’t really reflect its content very well.
As a matter of fact a DB2 course should talk about triggers, concurrent queries, rollback strategies, stocked procedures, …).
First I was not really confident with my knowledge in these matters (and moreover I didn’t have books on those topics with me).
And second, as I already said, they had a lack of practise. Therefore, it would be more correct to call that course “Database applications”, or even better “Web-oriented database applications”.
Indeed, the first week we saw the general architecture of a web application using a database.
Then how to convert a Entity-Relation diagram to a relational diagram (in order to deploy the database).
Then, an introduction to the HTML language in order to let them develop their own formulaires from scratch to interact with the database.
I’ve intentionally limited the introduction to the simplest balises: italic, bold, underlined, font, hr lines, ordered and unordered lists, links, and last but not least forms.
After that, we saw the PHP script language. It was quite difficult to teach them that since they almost don’t have any programming experience.
So, I had to explain them what’s a variable, what’s an array, and so on!
But at the end of the course, they saw not only variables and arrays, but also if-conditions, for and while loops, how to use data provided by the user through an HML form and how PHP can interact with a MySQL Server (!!!). I think it’s quite impressive in that period of time (especially since they had to learn everything from the very beginning!!!).
For the exam, they had to write a HTML form to add a new journalist (given the same E-R diagram than the one for the DB1 exam) and a PHP script to handle the answer differently according to the sex of the journalist specified in the formulaire.
It also had to show as many candles as the age of the journalist. Thus, using a for-loop. Here is the correction:
The expected result, the HTML form and the PHP script.
They also had to prepare their own project by group of three. Each week had its own mini-report;
- Week 1: The entity-relation diagram of their database
- Week 2: The relational diagram of their database plus examples of interesting queries and a HTML formulaire regarding their application.
- Week 3: Setting the database in a MySQL server using PHPMyAdmin, and the PHP script to handle the formulaire and interact with their datatase
Only two groups had a working web application. But the others were really near.
We didn’t have time to let them present their work though.
We can say they now have a good overview of all the components of such an application.
But we saw each of these in a really short fashion.
It may be interesting to go deeper in the subjects such as HTML and PHP.