Good database design involves the acquisition and deployment of skills which have a wider relevance to the educational process. From a set of more or less instinctive rules of thumb a formal discipline or "methodology" of database design has evolved. Applying that methodology can be of great benefit to a very wide range of academic subjects: it requires fundamental skills of abstraction and generalisation and it provides a simple mechanism whereby complex ideas and information structures can be represented and manipulated, even without the use of a computer.