Databases and Favorite Things

This evening, I was working on an informatics course I'm helping to write and opened up one of my database design texts to review some stuff. Rosie climbed up in my lap and started asking questions about data flow, read part of a section, and then asked if we could make a database of our own. Um... sure, I said. "We need a REALLY huge piece of graph paper," she said. Her dad jumped in and explained why we have computers - they can do really huge imaginary sheets of paper. Fantastic! says Rosie. Let's go make a database on Mom's computer!

I have to admit I was somewhat bemused, since I was trying to imagine whether this would have been remotely interesting to me as a child. Possibly not, no, but data flow was always interesting. I remember those vacuum tube things that the old-style drive-through bank tellers used were utterly maddening/fascinating to me due to the idea that information went through the tubes. I imagined them expanding exponentially in massive recursive patterns till I went nuts with it. Teh tubes! No wonder I work on the net.

So we made a database of people in the house, listing names, hair and eye color, favorite color, and 3 top fears. When we got all the data in, I tried to show Rosie how to sort the data, but unfortunately I'd somewhat automatically created a key field with sequential numbering. The sorting disarranged the sequence and Rosie had a litter of kittens and a near-meltdown. Well, OK. We'll get into the beauties of data manipulation later. In the meantime, the gaps in some of the fields bug her (the cat's cell phone number, for instance, is a necessarily blank field). Ah, a child after my own heart!

We went to one of the teacher stores as a treat and I got Rosie a big tub of the only toy she's been willing to play with the past three weeks. Her homeschool teacher had given her a very small set of pattern blocks for conceptual math manipulatives - only 30! Rosie kept saying. So now she has 250 pattern blocks and can create huger and more complex symmetrical patterns out of the blocks. I said musingly to Rosie's dad, "I think most people make pictures with these things instead of patterns, which seems really weird," and he laughed and said that's why we were married.