Friday’s database session again!
Really enjoyed the Cert III macros class today. I spent a lot of time on Thursday building activities to scaffold a few concepts/skills in MS Access. I’m particularly enjoying seeing the participants investigating and learning themselves!
For example, one of the focuses today was to see how we can use VBA within Access. We’ve already done extensive work using VBA in Excel, but Access is quite different in that it tries to make things a lot simpler, but inevitably makes things more difficult. We had a discovery task (based on a Moodle forum), where the participants ran out of the blocks to discover themselves how they can display a simple MessageBox from a button on a form (displaying something like “This database was designed by [whoever]”. The participants really got into the activity and raced to find different ways to do so in Access. When some students found a way, they then posted to the forum (with some encouragement) enabling others to try their method.
I then extended a scenario from their Excel VBA coding to Access, enabling participants to build upon their previous knowledge from the Excel exercises - again, letting participants discover and help each other.
I guess I’m really enjoying seeing students discover things themselves through carefully structured activities, rather than just listenting to me telling them how to do it then practicing themselves.
