My Mid-Term Exam

As you some of you may know I am taking a class in MySQL & Database Design at Champlain College in Burlington. The following is my Mid-Term exam. At the bottom of this post you will find a link that will take you to what i submitted as my exam. Maybe you will find this interesting. I had fun doing it. Colleen says i went a little overboard as I went above and beyond the instructions and actually created the database and the interface. She calls this the Valedictorian Complex. I call it fun :)

WEB 200 Mid-Term Exam:

Please answer all questions as instructed. You may use paper and pencil for this exam.

1. Based on the information below, answer the questions that follow:
A small student learning center offers remedial courses to high school students who would like to improve their skills in math, computer applications and science. Students can take math courses such as Algebra I, Algebra II, Trigonometry, Calculus, and Statistics. In science, they can choose from Chemistry, Biology or Physics. The computer applications course include Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access. When a parent registers a child, the following data must be supplied:

1. parent full name
2. student full name
3. address
4. home telephone number
5. student e-mail address
6. parent cell phone number (if there is one)
7. student cell phone number (if there is one)

A student may take as many courses as desired, there is no limit. Also, there are no limits on class size and there is no need to track any instructor information.
There are only two methods of payment that are accepted which include cash or check. The learning center is not able to accept credit card payments. There are no exceptions to this. Due to this situation, there is no need to track method of payment.

At the end of the course, each student receives a letter grade that ranges from A through F. The grade report will include the student's name as well as the course, the course grade and the category of the course (ie math, science or computer applications).

Please model a database that will track student registration data, all courses an individual student takes and student grades for each course taken. Please note, the learning center staff will want to pull up data that will tell them what students are taking the courses offered at the learning center.

Given the information provided above, here are some basic assumptions:

Assumptions:
8. The parent and student live at the same address
9. Every student is registered successfully
10. One parent can register more than one student
11. One student is registered by only one parent
12. DO NOT TRACK PAYMENTS!
13. Instructors are irrelevant to this database
14. No student ever drops from a course
15. Staff data is not required
16. The name of the learning center is irrelevant

You may add other assumptions to the ones enumerated above. If you do, you must explicitly state each assumption somewhere in your design.

3. Please construct an E-R Diagram that represents a normalized database. Your database must be normalized to the 3NF.

4. Now create the tables you need that will support your database design. Create some fictitious data for each table. Your table should include the fields (attributes) going across and at least five rows of data per table.

Click HERE to see my EXAM

Daylight Savings Time

We changed our clocks ahead this past week, a grand re-programming of the groupmind; a ritual: unconscious as all the group rituals are in our culture. Daylight Savings Time serves the corporate military industrial complex by optimizing daylight hours for production and consumption.

Contrary to popular belief Daylight Savings Time has nothing to do with farmers or school kids and has everything to do with stimulating our economy by providing more daylight hours for shopping. Thus our clocktime is reprogrammed and en masse we began this past Sunday to go to bed an hour earlier, rise an hour earlier and move everything we do an hour earlier in relation to the rising and setting of the sun. I don't like it because it reminds me how much I am attuned to the clock rather than the sun. It feels like the sun rising sooner and setting later when in fact nothing has changed but our sync with the clock.

Daylight Savings Time is another indication of how re-moved from the natural world we are as a culture. Daylight Savings Time pushes us even more out of sync from the cycles of natural time which are optimal for us where harmony and health are concerned.

We are cells in the global culture and look at what that produces: Conflict and Misery. We are so much better than that. We are of the earth, our purpose as humans is not to acquire material wealth and power but rather be the hands and the mind of Earth and an active agent in our own evolution as well as that of the Earth & of the Universe.

Time is a quantity, one of 2 co-ordinates in our space/time continuum but TIME is also a quality. To get back on the path we need to honor the QUALITIES of TIME as well as make our rituals conscious and get rid of the ones like Daylight Savings Time which only serves the corporate military industrial complex and does nothing to optimize our evolution as Humans-in-Universe.