Breathing Life into Database Textbooks

Despite its tremendous utility, database systems has often been considered an unexciting topic for undergraduate curricula. To remedy this, we describe a novel interactive electronic textbook for teaching undergraduate database systems courses. Designed for tablets, the textbook embeds a fully capable database. All parts of the textbook – examples, expressions, figures and explanations in the document are live, fully-functional elements of the database. In contrast to canned illustrations and animations, students can interact with each textbook element. The rapid feedback loop with the database allows the user to explore and understand the full scope of valid and invalid queries to the database. Wireless connectivity allows the instructor to perform detailed realtime analysis of classroom performance and provide interactive feedback, merging textbook instruction with in-class demonstrations, allowing for the scaling out of classrooms. We discuss the design of our prototype implementation of this concept.