ERD Tutor

Software	OO language such as PHP or JSP, plus HTML and CSS; or for a content-oriented non-technical project, HTML and CSS or PowerPoint
Covers	Databases, object-oriented development, interface design, optionally mobile app development
Skills Required	Programming, relational databases, interest in psychology of learning
Challenge	Conceptual ?? Technical ??? Programming ???

Brief Description

Entity Relationship Diagrams are central to all work with relational databases. People with a little database experience find the easiest and simplest way to design a database is sketching out an ERD - the rest is a mechanical process. And the easy and obvious way to understand what a database can and can't do is by reading the ERD - for any database system by far the most important page of a final year project report.

But even though ERDs seem simple and obvious to many people, especially those who have forgotten when they learned how to draw them, they give quite a lot of students trouble. We know from experience that students learn better how to turn system requirements into a data design by getting more practice - that we don't have space in the curriculum to provide.

The challenge of this project is to develop a computer tutor for reading and constructing ERDs, to understand what a data design can do, and what data design is needed to meet particular information storage requirements. This might provide both bits of explanation and examples, and questions where students might be asked to make a choice about adding a feature to a diagram or answer a question about it, either to get the syntax right, or to achieve a particular result.

Variants

The low-tech way to do this is to have a large tangled nest of web pages or PowerPoint slides that users navigate around according to their responses to various questions. This approach would be very low in technical computer science content, so would not be suitable for students taking BCS validated computer science degrees, but might suit someone doing an information systems or information technology course. Done this way, the project would be very content-oriented and would need a lot of high quality content.

Extensions

The system would gain from having a modular design, where examples or question sets could be added or removed. In an ideal world, these would be constructed using some sort of content management system.

A system that enabled the student to assess his or her progress by answering quiz questions would be very valuable, even more so if it gave the student a score. An ambitious extension would be a system that enabled the administration of tests of ERD competence.

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