Free Databases and Data Visualisations course for kids Week 3

Databases and Data Visualisations course for kids aged between 11 to 15 years week 3 update. It was a full house yesterday with 15 kids and 5 parents attending the course. #sqlfamily #microsoftnz

During my recap of what happened last week, two of the kids wanted to answer all of my questions.  For the homework that I have given, I could see kids create databases named 'mytrips', 'moviesworld', 'personalitytraits', 'eventmanagement', 'Hobbies' etc.

There were only 2 challenges faced by the kids when they were doing their home work.  First was when they had a space in the database or table name. Second was the table was not created in the new database they created.

The agenda for week 3 was to show them how to insert data into the tables and view the data.  I could just cover select statement and basic where clause and the time was up.

I feel very happy to see the enthusiasm in these kids. I am looking forward for the session on next Monday.

Databases and Data Visualisations course for kids Week 2

Databases and Data Visualisations course for kids aged between 11 to 15 years week 2 update. It was good to see so many responses for my last weeks post. #sqlfamily #microsoftnz It was good to see all the kids come back to hear all about databases for the 2nd week.   So first I started off with a Recap of last week, to help the 3 new kids understand the database concepts and also to test the knowledge that they have gained. It was good to see that they remembered most of the concepts except for the redundancy part. The agenda for week 2 was to show them how they could access SSMS and create a database and a table. Everyone of them had hands on experience creating a database named school and a table named student. I also wanted to cover how to insert data in this week but ran out of time so will do that next week. In the end as promised last week, I covered Excel tips as below. - Select All with One click - Open multiple excel files at a time - Move within an excel sheet (Ctrl +Home, Ctrl+End, Ctrl + arrow keys, Ctrl+Shift+Arrow Keys, - Move between different sheets (Ctrl + Tab) I have also given them some homework to ensure that they practice what was learnt in the past 2 sessions. I am looking forward for the session on next Monday.

Databases and Data Visualisations Course for kids Week 1

As mentioned last week, I have started the Databases and Data Visualisations course for kids aged between 11 to 15 years yesterday.

It was a very good and fun experience teaching these kids about database concepts.  I asked each one of them what a database means to them.  Everyone had a good basic understanding of what a database meant before I showed them what it meant.  The one response that I liked from one of them was "A database is a base where you store data"

To explain about Relational Databases and Normalisation, I have asked each one of them to type in some information about their studentids names, classes, teachers and schools.

This activity proved to be useful to make them understand the concept of redundany and the disadvantages that arise out of it.  Then it was easy for me to explain about Normalisation.

I have given them home work of installing SQL Server Express on their laptops.

Since I have used Excel for their activity there arose a need for them to know more about Excel.  So I will be doing a 15 - 20 min session on Excel every week basically giving them some Excel tips.

I am looking forward for the session of Creating databases and tables using SQL Server next Monday.

Teaching kids about databases

Every year I try to teach kids some aspects of Technology. Last year I taught Game Development using Construct 2 for a group of 12 primary and intermediate school kids. They developed 9 games and participated at a competition that involved High School kids. Two of the games got 2nd and 3rd prizes as well.

In this process I really enjoyed teaching the basics and the kids also enjoyed making the games that they liked and learned a lot.

So I was thinking of what to teach them and came up with a lot of ideas and finally settled with -- why not teach them with what I hae been doing for the last 15 years ? 

And so I came up with the course title 'Database Programming and Data Visualisations' For this I will be using the latest SQL Server Express and Power BI as the database and data visualisation tools. I have planned this to do in a span of 8 - 10 weeks.

Below is the list of topics I am going to cover for this free course.

• Introduction to databases
• Create an SQL database along with some tables 
• Insert Update and Delete data 
• Importing data
• Querying the data using DDL statements
• Introduction to Data Visualisation
• Introduction to Power BI 
• DAX basics 
• Create Visualisations 
• Usage of bookmarks and drillthroughs
• Create and share dashboards based on reports in Power BI desktop
• Using custom visuals
• Optimise the model for Natural Language Query

I would like to make it as fun and interesting as Hamish Watsonpossible. So I look to you all for ideas to help me deliver this successfully so that they can get the fundamentals fo database basics, normalisation, relational databases and visualisation concepts right.

#sqlfamily, #powerbi, #microsoftnz

So please bring along all your creative ideas that can help me deliver this program successfully.