In recent years a small number of web-based tools have been proposed to help students learn to write SQL query statements and also to assess students' SQL writing skills. SQLify is a new SQL teaching and assessment tool that extends the current state-of-the-art by incorporating peer review and enhanced automatic assessment based on database theory to produce more comprehensive feedback to students. SQLify (pronounced as squalify) is intended to yield a richer learning experience for students and reduce marking load for instructors. In this paper SQLify is compared with existing tools and important new features are demonstrated.
As part of a wide-ranging phenomenographic study of computing teachers, we explored their varying understandings of the lab practical class and discovered four distinct categories of description of lab practicals. We consider which of these categories appear comparable with non-lecture classes in other disciplines, and which appear distinctive to computing. An awareness of this range of approaches to conducting practical lab classes will better enable academics to consider which is best suited to their own purposes when designing courses.