Based on conversation with other students, I don't think I'm the only one who came out of the go_team and webwork database assignments feeling frustrated and bewildered. I'm curious to know what the learning objectives were for those projects because I'm pretty sure I missed them. I pretty much felt like I was blindly guessing at what someone else was doing. I really don't know what skills I may have developed during the process.
Any feedback from other students?
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3 comments:
My brief opinion is that it is sometimes good to learn how to appreciate proper design not by properly designing things but to look at situations where there was not a proper design and analyze the situation. This way not only do you develop skills that allow you to look past all of the nasty design but also learn to appreciate the techniques that are taught to you for designing things properly.
So not only did we learn to appreciate nicely and properly designed databases, we also learned how to struggle through the annoyance of having to understand an extremely complex poor design. Which just helps increase our ability to solve problems in diverse situations. These were real life database systems, people like us may not always have the luxury of designing brand new systems, rather we may have to sift through poor designs, document and understand the design, and then maybe even re-implement a better design, which most likely should not be done without a proper understanding of the current design and the reasons behind the design, whether it be properly or poorly designed.
I also thought the assignment was annoying (which could partially be the point) but I also feel that I have a better understanding of what NOT to do when designing a database, no matter how obvious that may be.
It's easy to design things properly, its hard to tell people why their design is wrong. Because not only do you have to understand their design, thought process and situation, you have to be able to understand all of the proper techniques sufficiently to know why their design is wrong.
That's just my brief opinion
I think this assignment is close to the real world, if you are given the assignment to restructure a large database and there is little to no documentation.
It is frustrating to work with because there doesn't seem to be any database documentation to we have to take guesses as to what each item in the database means.
The database is also rather large and unwieldy. Trying to design a meaningful ER diagram for the database is a difficult process, especially when the design of the database and our knowledge of the database is limited to where we are not really sure what relates to what. The table structure, ie NPL-DB1 and NPL-DB2 etc., is awkward.
The table description and analysis is a little bit more straightforward.
I've already used up my 2 late assignments on these trying to figure out where to even start. I don't know how to put it any more plainly than that.
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