541 Week 6: Relative Advantage of Using Spreadsheets and Databases in Education

This week I almost felt like I should have diverted my focus from middle school computer programming to another classroom application because it felt too easy.  I can see how this might be a thought provoking exercise for other content areas, but spreadsheets and databases are already built into the computer programming curriculum.

In computer programming, students learn about arrays, objects, and databases as ways to store and retrieve data.  Instead of thinking of what data to fill in the table, I took the approach of how to create the tables and databases that store the data.  In programming class it is essential to understand how to store and retrieve data.

For my examples I talk about a simple HTML table, a table that holds High Scores, an array that contains the x and y coordinates of raindrops, and an array of objects that contains information about books.  These are all examples of projects the students will have to complete.  Even so, many more than these 4 projects utilize databases or tables of information.

The lesson I outlined is meant for students to learn about how to create their own SQL database.  SQL is a widely used database language and will be very beneficial to the students.  SQL also takes the students from isolated data tables to the next step of a relational database (where many tables interact with each other).