A Proposal of Grammar-Concept Understanding Problem for Self-Study of Introduction Basic to SQL Database Programming

Nowadays, SQL (Structured Query Language) is widely used in professional schools and colleges across the globe. $S Q L$ is an efficient domain-specific language for managing and querying relational databases. Previously, to assist self-studies of popular programming languages, we have developed the Programming Learning Assistant System (PLAS). PLAS offers the grammar-concept understanding problem (GUP) as the first-step study of understanding key concepts in a language. In this paper, we present a study of GUP for the introductory $S Q L$ database programming for novice students to comprehend its important terms and behaviours. A GUP instance consists of a set of questions and a table where each question requests either $\boldsymbol{T}$ (true) or $\boldsymbol{F}$ (false) of its statement. Any student answer is marked by string matching with the correct one. For evaluations, we generated five GUP instances on the fundamental concepts of SQL database programming and assigned them to 30 undergraduate students at Indonesian Institute of Business and Technology. As a questionnaire, we also asked them to answer to the questions on the usability. Their solution results and System Usability Scale (SUS) scores confirmed the effectiveness of the proposal.