The Design And Implementation Of The Supporting Environment Of Database Course’s Executable Case Based On Wiki

Database is a very important technology which has played an important role inmany computer fields. Along with the computer’s popularity during work, study andresearch, there are more and more urgent needs for database manager and designer. Butas an important way to cultivate database talent, database teaching is not so satisfactory.The purpose of database teaching is to make learners own the ability to design anexecutable database system. However, database design is a complex process, whichrequires both a solid theoretical knowledge to guide the direction and plenty of designexperience to avoid mistakes. Traditional database teaching is mainly to teach theorywhich makes students have difficulty in applying the theory to design. Case teachingteaches both theory and design experience through the case, and it has remarkablyimproved teaching quality. But as we know, the case in traditional teaching is static, wecan only get the runnable system at the end of the design which makes the learners losemany chances to learn, and the database design is an iterative process, there may besome different designs to solve one problems by different considerations, but thetraditional way to organize the cases has great difficulty in showing these differences tothe learners to make them learn more. In the group practice of the case teaching, therealso exists many problems, such as the teacher can’t get the real division of the labor inthe study group, the members in the group can’t have real collaborative learning, theteacher can’t prevent cheating, the learners lack initiative, the case which is handed inby learners can’t be reused, and so on.To solve the above problems, the paper analyzes the needs of the teachers andstudents in teaching and learning, and comes up with a database teaching aidedenvironment based on wiki. It mainly contains three modules:1) An executable case based on Wiki. It contains a database modeling supportedmodel and a executable case supported in database implementation model. User can usedatabase modeling, filling data, executing SQL and similar functions implied by thistwo models to achieve a running system to exam the system he designs at any timeduring the database design, he can also organize the different ways to solve oneproblem and get the history version of one design with the multiple-version function.The functions like group, collaborative editing in the system can solve the problemsappeared in collaborate study effectively2) Knowledge management. There may be a great deal of cases in the system, thestudents may have difficult in managing document and finding the knowledge they need.So, here raises using ontology to manage the knowledge and the concept of Tag Tree.To organize the tags into a tree by their logical relations, the students can find the tagthey need in the tree very fast, and they can find all they need through the tag. 3) Information push. The paper also presents information push to solve theproblem that students lack initiative. By pushing the changes in Wiki such as the casethey may concern and new added cases to students to make them watch theseinformation directly at the first time and improve their viewing and studying the case’sprobability.The article suggests the system requirements by analyzing the database teachingand its participants from the point of the software engineering, and gives the detailprocess of design and implementation. Finally, it introduces how the system providessupport to the database case teaching through its modules.