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Change the GRASS GIS start up to more beginner friendly #24

Open grass-svn2git opened 5 years ago

grass-svn2git commented 5 years ago

Reported by @hellik on 2 Jan 2018 11:28 UTC hi,

during the GCI contest with young students, we get following feedback:

GRASS GIS is a cool and nice software, but could you make it a little bit more beginner-friendly

the startup with choose location/mapset seems often to be confusing

therefore to broaden the user community, the startup should be changed to:

- start first layer manager and map display into a default ll-wgs84-location

- then offer the dialogue choose location/mapset-new location/mapset

- introduce a -vintage flag to be able to change to the old behaviour

GRASS GIS version and provenance

svn-trunk

Migrated-From: https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/ticket/3474

grass-svn2git commented 5 years ago

Comment by @veroandreo on 2 Jan 2018 14:37 UTC Thanks Helli for opening this ticket and hopefully triggering some discussion on this matter. We already discussed about it in the autumn 2017 community sprint (https://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Talk:GRASS_GIS_Community_Sprint_Autumn_2017).

Just to illustrate, here are some statistics about the GCI "Install GRASS GIS and download NC dataset" beginner task:

As of today (02/01/18), there are 8 students working on this task and 17 have completed the task so far.

However, 24 students have abandoned the task and 15 ran out of time (they had 3 days to complete it). From these students, we get comments such as:

Of course, some might reflect a lack of understanding of a GIS, but they are doing pretty well in OSGeo tasks and such comments I have heard not only from high school students. IMHO, to make GRASS GIS easier for new-comers and first-time users is really beneficial for us, we cannot get more users and future developers if they feel it is that hard to display a map.

grass-svn2git commented 5 years ago

Comment by @wenzeslaus on 2 Jun 2018 15:04 UTC See https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/wxGUIDevelopment/New_Startup for solutions proposed so far (and of course, please contribute).

grass-svn2git commented 5 years ago

Modified by @wenzeslaus on 6 Jun 2018 16:42 UTC

grass-svn2git commented 5 years ago

Comment by @cmbarton on 6 Jun 2018 17:14 UTC Replying to [comment:1 veroandreo]:

Thanks Helli for opening this ticket and hopefully triggering some discussion on this matter. We already discussed about it in the autumn 2017 community sprint (https://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Talk:GRASS_GIS_Community_Sprint_Autumn_2017).

Just to illustrate, here are some statistics about the GCI "Install GRASS GIS and download NC dataset" beginner task:

As of today (02/01/18), there are 8 students working on this task and 17 have completed the task so far.

However, 24 students have abandoned the task and 15 ran out of time (they had 3 days to complete it). From these students, we get comments such as:

  • "once i open the grass gis console...it opens another application called layer manager"
  • "why is it so hard to do this?"
  • "I don't know how to add dataset of north carolina ...what to do next? how to add map of north carolina"
  • "how do you open it after you extracted it"
  • "I've downloaded the software and also the data base, but the map doesn't seem to open in app, I'm kind of stuck here"
  • "However, I can't seem to be able to see anything upon opening it. The UI opens fine, but I can't see a map or anything after selecting the North Carolina dataset."

Of course, some might reflect a lack of understanding of a GIS, but they are doing pretty well in OSGeo tasks and such comments I have heard not only from high school students. IMHO, to make GRASS GIS easier for new-comers and first-time users is really beneficial for us, we cannot get more users and future developers if they feel it is that hard to display a map.

I've taught quite a few beginning GIS classes with GRASS now. I've also done some short training sessions with QGIS. Most (all?) of the comments above would apply equally to QGIS.

grass-svn2git commented 5 years ago

Comment by @cmbarton on 6 Jun 2018 17:17 UTC Replying to [comment:2 wenzeslaus]:

See https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/wxGUIDevelopment/New_Startup for solutions proposed so far (and of course, please contribute).

I added a couple of thoughts there. Another one that might help would be better integrate saved workspaces with Projects (AKA Locations) or Mapsets. We could have a default workspace for each Mapset, for example, which would open when GRASS is launched and that Mapset chosen. By default it would be blank. But for demo sets like North Carolina, the default workspace could have several maps that would automatically show up in the display.

grass-svn2git commented 5 years ago

Comment by @wenzeslaus on 6 Jun 2018 17:35 UTC Replying to [comment:5 cmbarton]:

Replying to [comment:2 wenzeslaus]:

See https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/wxGUIDevelopment/New_Startup for solutions proposed so far (and of course, please contribute).

I added a couple of thoughts there.

Please check if your changes were saved. I don't see them in the history:

https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/wxGUIDevelopment/New_Startup?action=history

grass-svn2git commented 5 years ago

Comment by @wenzeslaus on 6 Jun 2018 17:40 UTC Replying to [comment:5 cmbarton]:

Another one that might help would be better integrate saved workspaces with Projects (AKA Locations) or Mapsets. We could have a default workspace for each Mapset, for example, which would open when GRASS is launched and that Mapset chosen. By default it would be blank. But for demo sets like North Carolina, the default workspace could have several maps that would automatically show up in the display.

This makes a lot of sense to me and it is actually already there:

https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/wxGUIDevelopment/New_Startup#NCSUGeoForAllLabJune5

And see the other way around too: https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/ticket/3575 (Associate database/location/mapset with workspace file)