TY - GEN
T1 - Generating SQL queries from visual specifications
AU - Obaido, George
AU - Ade-Ibijola, Abejide
AU - Vadapalli, Hima
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - The Structured Query Language (SQL) is the most widely used declarative language for accessing relational databases, and an essential topic in introductory database courses in higher learning institutions. Despite the intuitiveness of SQL, formulating and comprehending written queries can be confusing, especially for undergraduate students. One major reason for this is that the simple syntax of SQL is often misleading and hard to comprehend. A number of tools have been developed to aid the comprehension of queries and to improve the mental models of students concerning the underlying logic of SQL. Some of these tools employed visualisation and animation in their approach to aid the comprehension of SQL. This paper presents an interactive comprehension aid based on visualisation, specifically designed to support the SQL SELECT statement, an area identified in the literature as problematic for students. The visualisation tool uses visual specifications depicting SQL operations to build queries. This is expected to reduce the cognitive load of a student who is learning SQL. We have shown with an online survey that adopting visual specifications in teaching systems assist students in attaining a richer learning experience in introductory database courses.
AB - The Structured Query Language (SQL) is the most widely used declarative language for accessing relational databases, and an essential topic in introductory database courses in higher learning institutions. Despite the intuitiveness of SQL, formulating and comprehending written queries can be confusing, especially for undergraduate students. One major reason for this is that the simple syntax of SQL is often misleading and hard to comprehend. A number of tools have been developed to aid the comprehension of queries and to improve the mental models of students concerning the underlying logic of SQL. Some of these tools employed visualisation and animation in their approach to aid the comprehension of SQL. This paper presents an interactive comprehension aid based on visualisation, specifically designed to support the SQL SELECT statement, an area identified in the literature as problematic for students. The visualisation tool uses visual specifications depicting SQL operations to build queries. This is expected to reduce the cognitive load of a student who is learning SQL. We have shown with an online survey that adopting visual specifications in teaching systems assist students in attaining a richer learning experience in introductory database courses.
KW - Learning via visualisation
KW - SQL comprehension
KW - Visual specification
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85059807802&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-05813-5_21
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-05813-5_21
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85059807802
SN - 9783030058128
T3 - Communications in Computer and Information Science
SP - 315
EP - 330
BT - ICT Education - 47th Annual Conference of the Southern African Computer Lecturers’ Association, SACLA 2018, Revised Selected Papers
A2 - Suleman, Hussein
A2 - Gruner, Stefan
A2 - Kabanda, Salah
PB - Springer Verlag
T2 - 47th Annual Conference of the Southern African Computing Lecturers Association, SACLA 2018
Y2 - 18 June 2018 through 20 June 2018
ER -