[Qgis-developer] Teaching with Qgis

[Barry Rowlingson]

The GIS teaching in our environmental faculty here uses commercial GIS
software. There is some mumbling about introducing Open Source but
this year's students will not have the pleasure.

As I've expressed an interest in teaching with Qgis, I thought I would
have a look at some typical GIS teaching examples and see how well
they translate to Qgis. I found this very nice set of lessons:

http://www.umaine.edu/mial/int527/labs.htm

and I plan to work through them, noting annoyances, problems, etc with
doing the exercises in Qgis. If anyone else is interested in
contributing then we should set up a shared space (google docs?) for
comments and discussion.

 A few things cropped up almost instantly:

 * Qgis' vector-raster tool doesn't let you choose character
attributes (ArcGIS automatically converts characters to numbers)
 * The vector-raster output grid specification can only be given as
number of cells - you can't tell it to output the same raster grid as
an existing raster, which is what you want to do if you are going to
do overlays.
 * Having two different file selectors (one Qt, one Linux native) is
an annoyance
 * Raster layers loading as flat gray rectangles is another annoyance
- I shouldn't have to go to Properties and fiddle to see something.

Obviously I'll file bugs and enhancements in the tracker, and keep an
eye open to see how many things are targetted for the next version,
and maybe even submit some code myself. But it'll be a good exercise
to go through a set of real-world exercises in Qgis to see how it
compares.

 I know its very easy to put together a good set of teaching materials
from scratch using Qgis since you tend to show off the things that you
know are easily doable in Qgis, but starting with someone else's
materials should show how flexible Qgis is in doing GIS analysis. Or
so I hope!

 Anyone else interested?

Barry