398 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION, VOL. 54, NO. 3, AUGUST 2011 ADVICE—Educational System for Teaching Database Courses Miloˇ s Cvetanovic ´ , Member, IEEE, Zaharije Radivojevic ´, Vladimir Blagojevic ´ , Member, IEEE, and Miroslav Bojovic ´ Abstract—This paper presents a Web-based educational system, ADVICE, that helps students to bridge the gap between database management system (DBMS) theory and practice. The usage of ADVICE is presented through a set of laboratory exercises de- veloped to teach students conceptual and logical modeling, SQL, formal query languages, and normalization. While working on the exercises, students use the system to access real databases, and the system provides them with feedback about their solutions. From the perspective of an instructor, the system allows easy exercise management and continual progress monitoring. The paper also describes a practical experience with the use of ADVICE on a data- base course over a three-year period. Index Terms—Computer science education, data models, data- base languages, database systems, educational technology. I. INTRODUCTION D ATABASE-RELATED courses play a significant role in teaching computer science and software engineering. One such course, Databases, is the first database management system (DBMS)-related course in the curriculum of the School of Elec- trical Engineering, University of Belgrade (ETF-BU), Belgrade, Serbia, where the authors currently work. The goal of the Data- base course is to introduce the basics of relational database de- sign and transaction management while emphasizing SQL. A working group, composed of a united task force from the IEEE and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) soci- eties, has identified a set of core and elective topics for data- base-related courses [1]. Table I gives a list of IEEE/ACM rec- ommended topics and their coverage by the Database course. The topics not covered by the Database course are covered by three other courses: Advanced Databases, Database Software Tools, and Information Systems. The IEEE/ACM recommendations also reflect the need for students to have a very strong theoretical and practical understanding of the topics. The IEEE/ACM recommendations provide one perspective on possible database course content; another perspective, gained from those who teach the subject matter, is that relational databases, SQL, conceptual modeling, normalization, and relational algebra are the most commonly Manuscript received May 21, 2009; revised August 29, 2009 and February 19, 2010; accepted July 21, 2010. Date of publication August 19, 2010; date of current version August 03, 2011. The authors are with the School of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade, Belgrade 11000, Serbia (e-mail: cmilos@etf.rs; zaki@etf.rs; bleki@etf.rs; mbojovic@etf.rs). Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TE.2010.2063431 taught topics [2], [3]. The authors find that there is a need for a set of laboratory exercises that would cover the most commonly taught topics as well as a need for an educational system that would support the exercises. This paper presents a set of laboratory exercises that were de- veloped to teach students how to create conceptual models and translate them into relational models, how to work with Data Definition Language (DDL) and Data Manipulation Language (DML) of SQL, how to work with formal query languages, and how to use the database normalization algorithms. The paper focuses on an integrated educational system named ADVICE (Automated Database Verification with Interactive Counter Ex- ample), developed to support the set of laboratory exercises. The ADVICE system is freely available on demand for noncommer- cial usage (contact the authors for details). The key feature of ADVICE is its provision of support for automated correctness checking in order to help students with self-assessment and to help the instructor with grading. Moreover, ADVICE allows stu- dents to work interactively with real-life database systems and instructors to monitor students’ progress, all through distance leaning. A list of topics covered by ADVICE is shown in Table I. ADVICE covers about 78% of the core topics, 30% of the elec- tive topics, and all of the most commonly taught topics. The paper has the following structure. Section II sheds more light on the current state of the field and on the analysis that preceded the development of ADVICE. Section III introduces the structure of ADVICE, and is followed by Section IV, which gives more details regarding verification algorithms developed for ADVICE. Section V describes the proposed set of laboratory exercises and use of ADVICE. A critical evaluation is given in Section VI, and Section VII concludes this paper. II. RELATED WORK The evaluation of database-related educational systems found in the open literature requires the use of appropriate criteria. The authors have established criteria that fall into two groups: those related to the coverage of topics and those related to the educa- tional process support features. The coverage of topics includes conceptual modeling, work with both DDL and DML parts of SQL, formal query languages, and database normalization. The educational process support includes features for the correctness checking of the open-answer questions, features for the moni- toring of students’ achievements, and distance-learning features to accommodate time and/or physical distance between students and instructors. An overview of the educational systems analyzed and their characteristics according to the established criteria are given in Table II. The systems differ greatly in terms of topics covered 0018-9359/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE