A Proposal of SQL Syntax Description Problem in SQL Programming Learning Assistant System

Nowadays, SQL (Structured Query Language) is widely taught in professional schools and colleges across the globe. SQL 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), which offers the grammar-concept understanding problem (GUP) and the comment insertion problem (CIP) as their first-step studies. In this paper, as a new application of PLAS, we propose an SQL syntax description problem (SDP) for understanding basic syntax of SQL database programming for novice students to perform queries ranging. An SDP instance consists of a set of questions and a table, where each question requests simple SQL syntax of its statement related to the table. Any answer is marked by string matching with the correct one. For evaluations, we generated six SDP instances on fundamental concepts of SQL database programming and assigned them to 34 undergraduate students at Indonesian Institute of Business and Technology (INSTIKI) who were taking the database programming course. Then, we asked them to answer the questions on the usability as a questionnaire. The solution results and System Usability Scale (SUS) scores confirmed the effectiveness of the proposal.