An Active Learning Simulation for Teaching Hadoop in an Undergraduate Business Curriculum

Abstract

[EN] This paper describes a hands-on simulation for teaching Hadoop concepts to undergraduate students of various majors (Finance, Marketing, etc.) in a business school. The simulation was developed for an introductory course in a Business Intelligence & Analytics (BI&A) curriculum and adapted for use in a Database Management (DB) course. Designing, deploying, and maintaining a physical Hadoop cluster on premises is expensive and cloud-based services are resource-intensive. Additionally, average technical skills of business students make a computer-based simulation too sophisticated to bring Hadoop into focus. The majority of business students, even when majoring in BI&A, will choose careers in which a practical understanding of Hadoop environments will be of great benefit, but these students will not need the deep programming or engineering expertise needed to implement one. This simulation provides an engaging, technically accurate model for how Hadoop stores, tracks, and accesses relational and non-relational data.