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Week 11 Activity — Georeference Your Neighborhood Sketch

Lecture · Day 20 · Tuesday of Week 11 — Geoplanning and Georeferencing

Graded in-class activity. Georeference Your Neighborhood Sketch: draw your neighborhood in pencil, photograph it, email it to yourself, and georeference it in QGIS. Record your completion on Learning Suite.

New in Fall 2026, paired with the Tuesday georeferencing presentation. Thursday of the same week, the hands-on session runs the advanced version with a real scanned map; see the Week 11 hands-on guide.

Setup. Pencils and paper. Every student needs a laptop with QGIS 3.44 today, so announce it the Thursday before. The Google satellite XYZ basemap connection from Week 2.

Run.

  1. Draw (7 minutes). On paper, in pencil, draw the neighborhood around your home or apartment from memory: your building, the streets on all four sides, and at least four things you could find on a satellite image (intersections, a park corner, a church, a parking lot). Label nothing; north up.
  2. Photograph it with your phone and email it to yourself. Save the image to your laptop in a folder without spaces in the path.
  3. QGIS. Open a project with the satellite basemap, set the project CRS to EPSG:26912, and zoom to your neighborhood.
  4. Layer > Georeferencer... Open Raster, choose the photo. Add Point on an intersection in the sketch, then From Map Canvas and click the same intersection on the satellite image. Repeat for four points spread to the corners of the sketch.
  5. Settings > Transformation Settings: Transformation type Helmert (it can rotate and scale a hand drawing but will not warp it), Resampling Nearest neighbor, Target CRS EPSG:26912, an output file next to the photo, tick Load in project when done. Then Start Georeferencing.
  6. The sketch lands on the satellite image. Set its opacity to 50 percent. Which of your streets are in the right place? Which are not? Try Polynomial 1 and compare; with six or more points, try Polynomial 2 and notice it starts bending the drawing to fit.
  7. Take a screenshot with the sketch over the imagery and upload it to In Class Activity: Georeference Your Neighborhood Sketch on Learning Suite.

Twenty-five minutes. What they learn: a drawing has no coordinates until you give it some, four good control points are worth more than ten bad ones, and memory is a poor surveying instrument.