Set expectations for the hour. Note the software change: this course now uses QGIS, not ArcGIS Pro. QGIS is free and cross-platform, so students install it themselves rather than relying on a lab license.

Pre-assessment — take a show of hands before revealing. Answer is E: a GIS is all of these together. Don't correct wrong answers yet; slide 8 does the real definition.

Answer is C, designing a high rise building — that's a CAD/BIM task. Worth acknowledging GIS still gets used for siting and context around a high rise, so the distinction is about the design work itself, not the project.

Answer is C: QGIS. Most students will guess ArcGIS Pro if they've heard of GIS before, or Civil 3D from other CCE courses — that's the teachable moment. Mention it's free, open source, and theirs to keep after graduation.

People are spatially oriented by nature. We think about where we've been, where we're at and where we're going all the time. This contributes to our "spatial identity" and is a major part of who we are as individuals. Let's play a little getting to know you game by answering these questions.

Let's see what your answers look like spatially… Imagine this map projected onto the floor of our classroom with Greenland near the whiteboard and Australia at the back of the room. Now go stand in the places that match your answers to these questions: Where are your primary ancestors from? Where were you born? Where would you go on vacation this year if money was no object? As you go to different parts of the room/world, take a minute to get to know the other students in the class and to understand their spatial identity and how it is similar/differs from yours.

Spatial features (the state polygons) link to attribute data (the GPA table) — each state on the map has a row in the table.

These screenshots are QGIS 3.44 LTR, the version on the Clyde 234 machines and the one the labs are written against. If a student installs the latest release instead, the menus will not match the lab handouts — tell them to take the long-term release. Point at the Layers panel on the left: the checkbox controls visibility, and the order controls what draws on top. Polygons here are Utah city boundaries.

Same project, roads layer turned on instead. Polylines have length but no area. Ask: is a river a polyline or a polygon? (Depends on scale — good discussion.)

Points are city centers derived from the city polygons. Ask what a point loses compared to a polygon — area, shape, boundary.

One row per feature, one column per attribute. Point out Shape_Leng and Shape_Area: QGIS carries geometry-derived fields too. Select a row in the live demo to show the map/table link.

All three feature types plus the attribute table. This is the payoff slide — everything they'll do in Lab 1 is visible here.

Processing Toolbox is the QGIS equivalent of ArcToolbox. Buffer is the classic first tool: it answers 'what is within X distance of this feature?' Don't run it here — save it for the live demo.

Keep this to about ten minutes. If the projector or QGIS misbehaves, the screenshots on slides 9-14 cover the same ground.

Examples left to right: land parcels (surveying/land development), Middle Fork Salmon River watershed (hydrology), TCEQ service regions (environmental regulation), River Land Tirol river network (water resources mapping), mangrove standing biomass from remote sensing (environmental monitoring).

Give students a few minutes to search for real GIS applications in civil and construction engineering and add them to the shared activity sheet.

Emphasise installing QGIS before Tuesday — Lab 1 assumes it's working on their own machine.

Note this is a different code from the activity sheet two slides back; say so, because some of the room will still be looking at that one. Five minutes, then a show of hands on the two that are worth an argument: whether a river is a polyline or a polygon, and what you lose when a city becomes a point. Covers both of this morning's decks, the course introduction as well as this one. If the room has no signal, put the URL on the board. The page is linked from the Week 1 page too.