Grade 9 data portrait of the names on their town's war memorial, built from CWGC records.

Year 10 have studied the Somme and Passchendaele and are asking how the war reached home. The teacher photographs the town's war memorial, and over three lessons each student takes eight or nine of its names and searches the Commonwealth War Graves Commission's online records, which cover 1.7 million Commonwealth service men and women who died in the two world wars, for each man's regiment, date of death, place of burial or commemoration and, where recorded, his age. The class pools every record in one Google Sheet and charts it by month of death, age, regiment and cemetery. Many towns find deaths clustered on single days, such as 1 July 1916, and men with no known grave commemorated on the Thiepval or Menin Gate memorials, and the class tests whether their own town fits that pattern. Each student adds a page to a class Google Site, shared only within the school domain, with their men's records, a chart and a 400-word explanation of what the town's data shows about how the war was fought. A pupil who finds a relative can tell the teacher, but family details stay off the sheet and the site.

Tools: Google Sheets, Google Sites Nine ideas for your own version in Generate