I am sceptical about why we teach MS Access to children. For almost all practical purposes (such as the Club database that we are doing) people use Excel to manage their data. It’s difficult to get kids to appreciate the importance of data types and field lengths when they could just put the data straight into Excel and have it recognised automatically. Then why use the clumsy Access Query interface when Excel’s Data Filters are much more intuitive.
With the ability to produce data entry forms in Excel another reason for using a database: the ability to stop users from breaking it bites the dust too. Its only when you need relational database functionality that Access becomes useful. Try explaining that to 12/3 year olds. In fact in the GCSE database course work that I am supervising at the moment they still aren’t onto relational databases.
For me it would be better to look at the impact of databases and data protection and not pretend that we are applying that knowledge when we use Access to store an address database. From my experiences in the work place even the most able users don’t understand why you would use Access and not Excel, and they find its not really worthy their while to learn it. I think I wasted a lot of time with Access before I actually went away and learned my relational database theory. I think its best to leave database building to the computer scientists and not users of ICT.
