SDB4323z Week 10 Selection Screens

Week 10 is about selection screens. This topic will not be in the final exam but this topic will be in Test 2. Furthermore, the knowledge that the students get can be used in the project. Nonetheless, the attendance was disappointing to me. To be honest, I am quite worried. Judging from the lab sessions, I can identify students that I consider weak and yet this students were not present in class. I do not know how this student's survive. I pity these students. It is not about me. What I am doing is not about me. It is about them. If you know you are weak. If you know even an open book programming, you are struggling, then you should do something about it. I see students in the lab not doing programs whereas the whole point of the lab IS DEVELOPING PROGRAMS.

SDB4313z / TEB1083 Week 10 Zachman Framework

Not many students attended the class this week. Still in holiday mood I guess. But whatever it is lecture has to go on. I presented Zachman Framework this week. But before going to Zachman, I need to refresh them a bit about what they have been learning in EA so far. It started from the concept of EA and until now which is EA framework. A topic before EA framework is EA Implementation methodology. The lecture for EA Implementation Methodology is delivered online. I finished the video lecture yesterday.

There are many materials on Zachman Framework on YouTube. I think students can just learn from watching these videos. My role is to strengthen their understanding by giving them exercise to do. Dear students, being a student is not an easy life. Everything in this world cannot be easy. You got to work for it. You got to take the hits like Rocky said. Some people might not be too understanding and accommodating. Don't expect people to be like that. You got to work and you got to work hard. I expect more from these final year students. Hope to see them again in the next class.

Week 9: Class Cancelled

Week 9 classes were cancelled the whole week. 

SDB4313z / TEB1083 Week 8 UML

The theme for this week's EA class is UML. Only three diagrams that the students need to be to "master" use case, class diagram and activity diagram. Constructing models and diagrams are part of EA documentation. This is to prepare students for Zachman Framework.

SDB4323z Week 8 Test 1

I did Test 1 on Wednesday. It was an open book/internet/notes test. It feels like lab but without interacting with one another. The questions in my opinion ARE EASY. Seriously. The test consists of two parts: Part A and Part B. Part A consists of four questions. The questions need to be answered on elearning. It is an open test. I expect students to search for the answer on the internet and just copy it down. EASY. Part B consists of two programming questions. The first question requires the students to use control structures IF THEN or CASE ENDCASE. If the students do the Grade program, the students can nail this off easily. Next question is about array fetch and display a sorted list. Again, this is easy. Declare internal table and workarea. Select record and put it into internal table. Sort the table and display using workarea through LOOP...ENDLOOP. I have shown this type of program in the lecture. I expect students to try out this program on their own. If they don't write, they will not know. To me, students who have difficulty in writing this program needs a lot of work. In final exam, students have to write an ABAP program. No ABAP editor to help the students out. No ABAP runtime system. From this point, you can see students at their respective grades.

Week 7 - Test Week

Week 7 is Test Week

TEB 1083 Week 6 Values and Risks

This week's topic is about values and risks. Generally, this topic is about the values and risks of adopting EA. For this topic, I assigned papers to project groups. The groups have to prepare a simple presentation slides and present the paper in front of the class. The purpose is for the students to share their understanding about the paper to their fellow friends. Overall, the students did well. After each presentation, I presented my thoughts about the content of the presentation.

SDB4323z Week 6 Unit 3 Performance During Table Access

In the previous lab, students were exposed to ABAP Dictionary. The activities were mostly on creating data objects i.e data elements, domain, structure i.e nested and deep structure and also table. In this week's lab, the students were introduced to two approached in improving performance during table access namely index and table buffering. For this topic, student should be able to see the difference between the two. Both improve table access performance but what about the difference.

I am well aware that majority of the students have not completed Unit 2 exercises so I gave them the opportunity to do the 5 exercises. Most of them are about to finish which is good. I also realized that there were one or two who just started doing the exercise. They were asking me fundamental questions which I believed have been explained last week and should not be explained again when most of the students are about to finish the exercises. My advice to these students, they have to catch up. They have to make time. If they missed, they need to ask their colleagues and take that initiative to complete the activity. Do not wait until the following week when everyone is making progress and you just started doing the exercise. Nonetheless, I am happy to see student who take the initiative to complete it. These students slot in their time to be at the lab doing the exercises. There are students who asked me through FB Messenger or Telegram. I appreciate this. 

Luckily, Unit 3 has only one exercise BUT the table that the students created at the end of exercise 5 of Unit 2 need to be populated. The SAP program that is used to populate the tables has errors so students can't use the program. A quick solution was to populate the tables manually. This is because if a table has no records, then there is no point to create index. 

SDB43123z Week 6 Case Study 2 Considering an EA Program

This week student discussed about Case Study 2: Considering an EA Program. The activity for this week is called Pair Composition. Pair composition is one of the active learning techniques that is normally adopted in language subjects. It is about two student collaboratively writes a composition. I asked the students to write a summary of the case study, thus using pair composition approach seems to be appropriate. I hope it does.

The first part of the project has already begun in the tutorial. The groups have to brainstorm of a business. The groups have to provide as much information as they can to the business. This business will soon become the client for the EA team project. I have been told most students were unable to attend because of some job interview that they had. In previous semesters, students can brainstorm and still have time to present their business. Eventhough, the business seems not complete but at least it gives something for the EA team to work on. The EA team has to obtain more information about the client's business.

The summaries were acceptable but the work is not as what I have instructed. Only the first paragraph is jointly written by the pair. The remaining paragraphs are the student's own work. I have the impression that the whole summary was the pair's work rather than individual. I assume that the students were not familiar with the method.