Paper explained
Seasoning Data Modeling Education with GARLIC: A Participatory Co-Design Framework
How can role-play teach students to represent different needs in a data model?
The question
Why this work
GARLIC turns participatory entity–relationship modeling into a teachable workshop. A shared scenario and role cards help participants articulate conflicting needs before translating them into entities, relationships, and constraints.
The approach
A visual guide
From a role card to a visible design decision
Shared scenario
Agree on the situation and its tensions.
Stakeholder voices
Use role cards to advocate distinct needs.
Shared ER model
Work through ONION to build a representation.
Trace every voice
Locate needs in entities, relationships, attributes, or constraints; revise omissions.
What the work contributes
Two initial 90-minute pilots, with five participants each, revealed a tendency to jump into technical solutions before representing stakeholder voices. These observations led to clearer advocacy roles, simpler starting scenarios, and more explicit checks for missing perspectives.
Original paper & resources
In Proceedings of the Workshops of the EDBT/ICDT 2026 Joint Conference, DataEd'26: 5th International Workshop on Data Systems Education, Tampere, Finland. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 4192. Published April 2026; workshop held 24 March 2026.
Citation
Makovska, V., Michurin, I., Tokhtamysh, M., Fletcher, G., & Stoyanovich, J. (2026). Seasoning Data Modeling Education with GARLIC: A Participatory Co-Design Framework. In Proceedings of the Workshops of the EDBT/ICDT 2026 Joint Conference, DataEd'26: 5th International Workshop on Data Systems Education. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 4192. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-4192/DataEd-paper4.pdf
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Makovska2026GARLIC,
title = {Seasoning Data Modeling Education with GARLIC: A Participatory Co-Design Framework},
author = {Makovska, Viktoriia and Michurin, Ihor and Tokhtamysh, Mariia and Fletcher, George and Stoyanovich, Julia},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshops of the EDBT/ICDT 2026 Joint Conference},
series = {CEUR Workshop Proceedings},
volume = {4192},
year = {2026},
address = {Tampere, Finland},
url = {https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-4192/DataEd-paper4.pdf},
eprint = {2602.18274},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
primaryClass = {cs.DB}
}