If It Was Easy, Everyone Would Do Databases!

In the last few years, since I began my teaching career, the subject of databases has come up occasionally with my peers and family. Generally, the conversation begins with a roll of the eyes and a comment that databases are hard to work with. Here are a few examples:

• Our North Junior High attendance secretary said that our student database, PowerSchool, is so difficult to navigate in that she is still entering demographics from last summer.
• My son, a college business major, said that he stays away from databases such as MS Access because of the difficulties in setting them up and creating reports.
• My brother, in his gas grill business, has his point-of-sale system set up in Access 2003. When he has a problem with it, he has to call his tech guy in San Diego because it is very difficult to navigate and modify.
• My fellow business education teachers in Menomonee Falls never look forward to teaching Access due to the many issues their students will have.
• I rolled my own eyes after trying a very basic intro to Access lesson plan in my second quarter of 8th grade Computer Applications at DeForest. It was hard for me to teach and hard for my students to learn. If I were to teach Access again, I would seek out training.
  

With all that being said, I believe that if we really want to learn how to create databases, we should take a class in it at schools such as WCTC or MATC. Databases are much more complex than spreadsheets, documents, and presentations and require more intensive training.

In my classroom, I use our grading/demographic database to create many reports. I will pull reports for sections, class types, assignment categories, missing assignments, comments, phone numbers, and parent/guardian contact names.

In our database work this past Tuesday evening, we tried DABBLEDB. The imported DPI database was confusing to work with. However, once we created our own from scratch, it started to make sense. I did mine on a mini-stock portfolio and created columns for company name, exchange traded on, ticker symbol, P/E ratio, and headquarters location. I then did a "Search" (similar to a query in Access) and found DABBLEDB to be very easy to use. I could envision my students trying this when they create their stock portfolios in our 10-week simulation. In my Business Venture classes next semester, I may have my students try DABBLEDB during our Human Resources unit. Here, they set up a hypothetical staff for their business plan. I believe they would enjoy creating columns (fields) with information such as name, address, phone number (home and cell), job, hours worked, hours available, pay rate, start date, etc. This would be an authentic application that would allow for creativity and analysis.

In conclusion, as my title to this blog suggests, databases are not easy to learn or use. However, with strong training and practice, everyone could indeed utilize databases.