Students' Perceptions on Engaging Database Domains and Structures

Students' Perceptions on Engaging Database Domains and Structures

Miedema, Daphne (Eindhoven University of Technology)
Taipalus, Toni (University of Jyväskylä)
Aivaloglou, E.A. (TU Delft Web Information Systems; Open University of the Netherlands)

2023

Several educational studies have argued for the contextualization of assignments, i.e., for providing a context or a story instead of an abstract or symbolic problem statement. Such contextualization may have beneficial effects such as higher student engagement and lower dropout rates. In the domain of database education, textbooks and educators typically provide an example database for context. These are then used to introduce key concepts related to database design, and to illustrate querying. However, it remains unstudied what kinds of database contexts are engaging for novices. In this paper, we study which aspects of database domain and complexity students find engaging through student reflections on a database creation assignment. We identify six factors regarding engaging domains, and five factors for engaging complexity. The main factor for domain-related engagement was Personal interest, the main factor for complexity engagement was Matching information requirements. Our findings can help database educators and book authors to design engaging exercise databases targeted for novices.

context
database
design
education
engagement

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:1ca51e5b-7f1c-43a1-8dfd-d605fa95cc3d

https://doi.org/10.1145/3545945.3569727

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), New York

978-1-4503-9431-4

SIGCSE 2023 - Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, SIGCSE 2023, 2023-03-15 → 2023-03-18, Toronto, Canada

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2023 Daphne Miedema, Toni Taipalus, E.A. Aivaloglou