When Professors want to introduce their students to Verilog, it is much easier for them to hand

out directly the open source toolchain than to ask students to register with a manufacturer to get a student license and to install from the manufacturer several GByte.

Here you find what a student has to say about learning Verilog with iceStudio:

"Avanzo más rápido con FPGA y con Icestudio que cuando empecé con Arduino. Verilog al nivel básico que me muevo es asequible."

Which I translate to:

"I make much faster progress with FPGAs with iceStudio compared to when I started with Arduino.
Verilog at the beginners level seems to be doable"

Universities like RUB in Bochum/Germany, Centralesupelec in Paris/France, Georgetown in Washington/USA and TU-Wien in Vienna/Austria currently evaluate the usage of icoBoard in their curriculum.

Here you can find some thoughts about what a good FPGA learnding environement should provide.

In the following video you can see how students do program a real FPGA with simple digital logic.

A good beginner tutorial you can find here, but it is in spanish

A great source for learning FPGA is the complete GO Board with its tutorials for just 50 USD

As a beginner, you should be able to focus on the essential things. Full featured Development tools can be quite confusing to a beginner.

As all our FPGA tools are open source, they can be integrated into a beginner IDE tailored to the needs of a beginner adressing simple FPGAs.

Example for this are Synthia, an IDe for writing FPGA projects in myHDL.