GIS learning with GRASS

Since 1996 GRASS is used in GIS classes at the Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile ed Ambientale of the Università di Trento. This paper describes the potential of this GIS, with freely available code, in Geographical Information Systems education, both for university courses and professional training. The use of GRASS offers several advantages: the software is accessible without licensing worries, the system can be freely distributed to students, the source code is available for the analysis of the algorithms and a large free collection of documentation exists on the Internet. Educational experiences gathered in several years of teaching using multimedia devices have been applied to specific courses on GIS and in land planning and management, where GIS is used as a tool. Different approaches in GIS training are presented: lectures, tutorials and full GRASS applications.