The advancement in technology these few years has dramatically changed the learning environments and transform the traditional approaches. Modern students are no longer fully attracted by traditional education methods. The same goes for computer sciences students when learning Structured Query Language (SQL), merely from textbooks and lectures. The learning process is way too structured and static without any engagement and self-experience, leads them to not understand the concept thoroughly and not motivated to learn. Therefore, they are looking for a more interesting, fun, motivating, and engaging learning experience.

Recently, there has been increasing interest among educators in the use of digital games as serious learning. Implementing games for educational purposes, in general, increases students' learning motivation and keenness to hand on thus improve the learning efficiency. Educational games are also demanded by universities or schools to enhance education. The target user of this educational game is the student.

A web-based educational detective game, SQL Murder Mystery, is proposed for students to learn and practice SQL in a fun way. Students can play the role of a detective to solve murder mystery cases with a few scenes of puzzles. In order to get clues to continue the games, students need to write SQL queries to solve the puzzles then retrieve information from the database. The game will end once the players identify the correct murderer. This game will bring students an idea of how a piece of information can get them access to a whole trove of further information if they can find the right data source and students will understand the importance of learning SQL queries in retrieving information from the database. The main technologies used in this application are HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, JQuery, PHP, SQLite database, MySQL database.