Fall Semester 2003, Databases
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Fall Semester 2003, Databases |
| Rain
Forest |
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| Classroom Mystery |
Donner Party |
Climate (My Database Lesson!) |
| Classified Ad for
President President Database |
Presidents:
This
activity began with an interesting news clip of John F. Kennedy, Jr. of
George magazine describing his search for the perfect
presidential candidate. Is there a way to characterize our presidential
hopeful? With this question, we took a look at data of past presidents
organized in a teacher-created database. By running queries and sorting
data, we were able to make generalizations and interesting observations
as we went our own quest searching for the next president. Using
the database allowed us to run different queries and sort of data to
analyze different combinations of data. This eventually led us to
describe what we need in a president. It would have been
difficult to make this same recommendation without the tool of the
database to sort and synthesize.
|
| Letter to Don |
Rain
Forests: Using the Rain Forest commercial database as a stand
alone,
unaccompanied piece of software would be ineffective. Instead,
this commercial database needs an authentic problem to drive the
activity and give students a purposeful direction. This database
is also an example of a hypermedia database. This enriches the
process of collecting data, as the user is also searching for and
linking information. |
| Civil War Page |
Civil
War: The Civil War
activity pointed us in the
direction of an online database with fascinating Census data from the
1800s. The challenge of this database is the way in which the
data changed over the years. This is a great point of discussion
particularly with Census data--what was going on in society
scientifically, politically, technologically to affect the collection
and reporting of data. Another challenge in this project is
working with an online database--the availability of the website and
the speed of accessing the data online.
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| A Terrible Crime Mystery Database |
Classroom
Mystery: In this activity we needed to create our own database
as one
of our classmates was a suspect in a crime. Modeling crime solving
techniques, we created a database with personal facts of a pool of
people, and then we used queries and sorts to narrow our search based
on clues provided. This activity allowed us the opportunity to design
our own database, but the activity could have also worked with a
teacher-created database.
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| Research Process -
Who Survives and Who Doesn't Donner Database |
Donner Party: I
thought this was a great activity that started with an interesting
article on a lesser known group of westward explorers. Right away me
interest was peaked. The teacher-created database enabled us to test
out our different hypotheses. Using a database to do this added
elements of student control and flexibility. |
| Climate - My
Database Lesson: In the lesson I designed, I used an online
database. I
had an opportunity to show my students this database, and they were
intrigued by all of the data made available for so many cities. They
particularly did a good job in finding cities, using their atlas, and
looking them up in the database. This was a good way for students to
connect resources that they have readily available. |
