All Inf1-DA students have weekly meetings with their course tutor in a group of 10–15 students. These start in Week 3 and continue until the end of semester. Course participation involves attending all your tutorials: if you are ill or otherwise unable to attend one week then email your tutor and if possible attend another group later in the same week.

There are tutorial groups on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. You can change to any group that has space available using the Informatics Student Portal at https://student.inf.ed.ac.uk. Click the View/Change link in your Group Membership table and then the Choose Tutorial Group button.

Links: Tutorial group membership, times and places; Student portal

Please note that the central university “My Timetable” interface does not track individual Informatics tutorial times. You need to check for yourself on the membership page linked above.

Exercises

Each tutorial has an associated sheet of exercises: you complete these before the meeting, and bring your solutions to the group for discussion. For tutorials to be useful and effective, it is important that each student has read and attempted the exercises before coming to the meeting. If you have not prepared for the tutorial then you may be sent away to do the exercises and attend a later group instead.

Each exercise sheet also includes examples of questions from past exam papers, and notes on worked solutions for these. Once the tutorials are past I shall also post notes on solutions for that week’s exercises.

You are welcome to discuss your work on these exercises with other students, and on any of the course discussion platforms. If you are having difficulties then ask on Piazza or approach me after any lecture.

Tutorial 1 Week 3 Entity-Relationship Modelling
Tutorial 2 Week 4 Relational Modelling
Tutorial 3 Week 5 Relational Algebra and Tuple Relational Calculus
Tutorial 4 Week 6 SQL with files travel.odb, film.odb and film-sol.odb
Tutorial 5 Week 7 XML and XPath with files restaurants.xml, restaurants-queries.txt, stext.xml, stext-queries.txt, stext-sol.xml and stext-queries-sol.txt
Tutorial 6 Week 8 Corpus Querying; CQP Tutorial
Tutorial 7 Week 9 Information Retrieval
Tutorial 8 Week 10 Practice Exam Questions
Tutorial 9 Week 11 Statistical Analysis with file survey.pdf

Q. What would you say to students considering taking this course?

Attend your tutorials. They are really helpful.

— Anonymous student giving feedback on a previous year’s course.