call for spec suggestions

[Sameer Verma]

Charles Austin wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 2:55 AM, nigel barker <tech at hiroshima-is.ac.jp> wrote:
>   
>> I appreciate these answers, but this is far away from my needs. I am not
>>  teaching CS to high school students. I teach mostly primary and middle
>>  school classes, and we use the computer to do tasks which are useful in
>>  the mainstream classes. According to UK and International Baccalaureate
>>  curriculum documents young kids are supposed to be able to use
>>  databases. Obviously this would be a GUI app, maybe even simpler than
>>  Access. I don't know what windows schools use, but it would seem there
>>  must be something, otherwise these curriculum writers wouldn't have got
>>  these ideas.
>>
>>     
>
> I wholeheartedly agree.  Teaching the very basics of database is far
> easier with a GUI - especially when it comes to concepts like primary
> keys and joins.  I deal with lower and middle school students as well
> - CLI databases is not a good way to introduce the concepts.
>
>   
>>
>>  Robert Arkiletian wrote:
>>  > On 4/14/08, Uwe Geercken <uwe.geercken at datamelt.com> wrote:
>>  >
>>  >>  I would recommend to anyone, who wants to learn a database, to start
>>  >>  on the console. same as for learning html, jave, etc. you can always
>>  >>  switch to a GUI at a later point of time in the process but at the
>>  >>  start it is important to learn the bascis and not have a tool do the
>>  >>  work.
>>  >>
>>     
> From my experience, learning databases was pretty easy, but I had the
> Access 2.0 GUI. Maybe I am a slow or "special" learner, but I cannot
> imagine learning about cross table queries without some sort of visual
> reference.  That being said, I have been strictly MySQL (command line)
> for quite some time now.  Once you learn the basics, the CLI is far
> superior.  This is way off topic by now, but you have to learn to walk
> before you can run.
>
> Regards,
> Charles
>
>   
Try SQL Designer. It runs in your browser and is quite visual (drag and
drop etc) and will spit out code for MySQL etc. Very neat.

http://ondras.zarovi.cz/sql/

Sameer

-- 
Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Information Systems
San Francisco State University
San Francisco CA 94132 USA
http://verma.sfsu.edu/
http://opensource.sfsu.edu/