Towards a minimalist approach to lesson planning of an introductory database course

Research addressing learning of individual database topics is much more common than research that attempts to address broader issues in learning of database. This paper proposes a lesson planning approach for an introductory database course based on selected principles of the minimalist instructional design and the ARCS model of motivational design. The basic idea is to design action oriented lessons in a way to involve student participation as early as possible and to foster confidence of students in the learning process. The adoption of the approach results in an ordering of database topics which is significantly different from mainstream practices.