[GRASSLIST:3446] Re: Just another stupid question from a paranoid education fun!

[Gordon Keith]

On Thu, 4 Apr 2002 19:34, ivan wrote:

> Once again can you see GRASS as an educational tool for students in
> Earth Science (Geology; Geophysics, Fluvial Geomorphology, Soil
> Science; Geography); Please send your opinion or www references if
> you aware  of any examples.

My take on grass is that it's fairly hard to use for lots of one off 
jobs. There are a lot of different commands that are hard to find and 
work out what they do. 

It's very good on doing the same or similar things over and over. Once 
you've worked out what commands and how they work, they are easy to 
script together and run in a variety of ways from scripts. When I'm 
working in grass I probably spend more time in emacs writing scripts 
which I paste to the command line than I do in grass itself (not 
counting the time grass is running the scripts and I'm doing something 
else).

If you are planning on giving students are series of tasks to do once 
off I'd say grass wasn't really a good idea. This is how I suspect most 
student assignments would work as you work through a curriculum, touch 
each topic and move on to the next.

If you are planning to do similar processing on a series of different 
data sets then grass has advantages. But that's not my experience of an 
educational environment.

If you are prepared to spoon feed the students with the grass commands 
they will need to get the job done it would be useable. To give the 
students a copy of grass and a task and say go do it would be a 
disaster.

I have no background at all in Earth Science, and very little 
experience with other GIS packages. So take everything I say with a 
grain of salt.

Regards
Gordon
-- 

Gordon Keith
Programmer/Data Analyst
Marine Acoustics
CSIRO Marine Research
http://www.marine.csiro.au

"Everything that can be invented has been invented." 
- Charles H. Duell, commissioner of U.S. Office of Patents in 1899