I’m clearly biased but I believe technology is critically important and we should be spending more effort teaching it than we are now. To that end, I’ve been volunteering with TEALS, a national program that allows professionals to teach Computer Science classes in a local high school. Something else I’ve been working on is developing a MySQL class to give as part of the Coalition 4 Queens program. As part of the process I wanted to share what I’m thinking of doing and would love to get some feedback to hopefully improve it. The general idea is that it will consist of 3 or 4 sessions with each session lasting a couple of hours. The class will be opt-in and the students should have some technology background.

Session I

• Overview of MySQL and relational databases. What are they? How are they used? What are the alternatives?
• Provide a quick overview of the normal forms and what they mean. What impact does it have when they’re violated and go over what well designed databases have.
• Introduce the dataset we will be working with. This will mostly likely be a dataset I’ll pull from some of my side projects that will hopefully be relevant. Currently, I’m thinking of using a database containing some fantasy football data that I’ve scraped.
• Make sure everyone has MySQL installed or can get it installed.

Session II

• Revist the dataset we’re working with and explain the relationships between the various tables and columns.
• Go over the basic syntax of a query: SELECT, FROM, and WHERE.
• Go over the basic INSERT statement.

Session III

• Review the basic syntax of a query and introduce the JOIN operations. Use joins to answer some simple questions from our dataset.
• Introduce the GROUP BY functionality and the ways it can be used to summarize data. Use this in conjunction with joins to explore our dataset.
• Develop some complicated and slow queries and introduce the idea of INDICES so everyone is aware of why they are useful.

Session IV

• Go over table creation and have the students come up with some interesting aggregate tables.
• Provide a quick overview of how to diagnose a query for performance and how to test a query to make sure it was written correctly.
• Discuss the various system tables (information_schema schema) and the various system commands that can be used to get a better understanding of MySQL