Helping Students with the Most Common Questions in an Introductory Databases Course

Abstract

The course “Introduction to Databases” focuses on teaching Structured Query Language to non-IT students. As the learners have had no exposure to programming-related courses or programming languages and have various backgrounds, it can cause different problems, and the students might need help while solving homework assignments. The goal of this paper is to give an overview of creating troubleshooters for the introductory database course. A troubleshooter is a set of hints designed to give clues to help the student overcome the most common problematic parts of the task. Interviews with course instructors, forum posts and students' individual homework assignments were analysed for creating six troubleshooters. Statistics from the troubleshooter environment and ratings by learners were collected to assess the quality of the development work. Although the learners did not rate the created troubleshooters highly, they agreed that the use of the troubleshooters should be continued in the following years. The comments of students help to improve the troubleshooters for the next courses.