Glad you like the LEFT JOIN idea. Thank you for being open to new ideas. Regarding table aliases, I understand the reluctance to overload your students with to

Glad you like the LEFT JOIN idea. Thank you for being open to new ideas. Regarding table aliases, I understand the reluctance to overload your students with too much information, but in my experience they really do make writing SQL a lot easier (when coupled with an IntelliSense-capable environment such as SSMS). Every time a student wants to reference a specific field they type one or two letters (ideally a name that is easy to remember, so if there was an ObjectType table a good alias would be OT, for example), a full stop, then all the available fields from that table are shown in a list. Nothing else is in that list, which makes the decision simpler to make. In SSMS, the IntelliSense usually displays automatically. Sometimes you experience a brief delay from building the cache, but manually toggling IntelliSense usually gets around this (it can be toggled manually with Ctrl + Space, which is an easy shortcut to remember). On a side note, I tend to use the AS keyword when creating table aliases as I like making them explicit, perhaps that habit will also be beneficial to your students as it's the same keyword used for renaming fields in the SELECT clause also, so in a student's head they can think of AS as rename.