Grade 12 Spanish data article on la España vaciada from a century of Soria census data.

Year 13 have read extracts from Sergio del Molino's La España vacía and watched a Spanish news report on villages left without a school or a shop. The teacher shows the Instituto Nacional de Estadística's series Alteraciones de los municipios en los Censos de Población desde 1842, which traces each Spanish municipality's population across the censuses, and shares a Google Sheet with the figures for the 183 municipalities of the province of Soria since 1900. Over three lessons each student calculates the change for each municipality between 1950 and the latest figures, noting where villages were merged into a neighbour, and sorts them to find the places that lost most, the few that grew and the decade when decline began. They then write a 500-word data article in Spanish, in the style of a newspaper data desk, built around a chart and three villages chosen from their own results and explaining the figures with the language of éxodo rural and envejecimiento. The teacher comments on the draft in Google Docs and students revise before the articles are shared with the class.

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