Help with my ICT Courework - Ideas Appreciated!

James_Bond

Hi there.

I'm currently studieing ICT at AS level, and we have to produce a database using Microsoft Access. The trouble is, I'm not sure what to base it on.


Has anyone got any ideas?
Replies will be thanked.

Cheers!:money:

MadCowMan

DVD rental shop ?

mrscruffy

Agree with MadCowMan. You want any scenario where you are trying to keep track of hiring/renting or loanding things to people.
e.g. DVD/Video store, musical instruments, camping equipment, library
This was you has 2 entities (people and objects) and a relationship (hint: one person can rent many DVDs but one DVD can only be rented to many people but only one person at any one time)

Ideally you will also want a "customer" for whom you are going to develop the database for as it will make it alost easier to perform a requirements analysis and evaluation for the database.

donny-gal

My son based his around the fact his school was setting up houses, and points. Using a list of pupils, and then giving them a rating for sports, behavior, academic skills, etc., to split them up fairly in the first place, then a created a points table for achievements, and demerits.

Do something you know well if you can, and if it can be useful to a sports club etc., all the better. Try to stay away from the mundane CD lists, and see if you can get an excel file of the data, typing in a list of names is very boring, and does not really show you can use Access. I am sure we have some sample papers in his mountain of rubbish left when we went to uni. Does your school have any, these showed projects which had got A, B and C grade results.

The fact Mum is not bad at Access helped too!;)

TheFaqqer

Agree with MadCowMan - I used to work for Oracle and this is the exact scenario we had to build when we joined.

You can have all sorts of things - inventory, user maintenance, overdue letters, stock reports etc. Lots of flexibility there for you.

Also, agree with donny-gal if that doesn't interest you - find something that does. Here's some more ideas:

- Mate of mine rewrote a company car management system at one stage (costs, links to reviews, specifications, optional extras, order form to get one)

- pseudo-online dating system

- Share portfolio manager

- Employee / HR system

- Cut-down (and free) version of Microsoft Money - track your money coming in and out, reports of biggest expenditure by value / category / date range.

I quite like the sound of the last one, especially given the forum you are asking!

HTH,

Faqqer

Aliktren

in the good old days the scenario was always an airline booking system, thats always a pretty good one as there are a fair few inter-relationships

marsden_pete

i work in a school and alot of the a-level course for access is around somekind of booking system for a bussiness.

johnmc

Agree with the all the above.

First find a subject that you enjoy. It's much easier to envisage how the data relates if you understand it. What are your hobbies? Are you in any clubs or anything that uses scores / points?

I suggest registering with Utter Access. It's free to use and you get LOADS of help (they won't write it for you but will give you direction when you get stuck).

There are numerous threads on there relating to the Normalization of data. Strongly reccommend that you get your head around that before you start.

superscaper

Has ICT replaced Computing then? When I did my AS level in computing, our project involved writing a program. Mine was a geometry teaching and testing program. Was quite proud of it, did it in BASIC and had to put in subroutines to handle displaying superscripts and the pi character. The test questions involved random numbers as well so it would be different every time you took the test. Ended up getting a C for the AS level overall which was a bit disappointing. Not much help to the OP but just reminiscing on my own experiences. The databases we set up during GCSE were usually a book/library lending system.

j_davies

I did a database based on fictional crimes and the people who may of commited the crimes and appearance a bit like the national crime database so you could have hair colour, eye colour, height, weight, distinguishing features so on and so fourth, I quite enjoyed it making up lots of fictional charcters then doing a search within the database of people with certain features as listed above.

MadCowMan

TheFaqqer wrote:

Agree with MadCowMan - I used to work for Oracle and this is the exact scenario we had to build when we joined.

You can have all sorts of things - inventory, user maintenance, overdue letters, stock reports etc. Lots of flexibility there for you.

Microsoft use a library system as a demo database on their SQL courses too