Mesurer la terre avec un bâton : Sur les pas d'Ératosthène

Measuring the size of the Earth using sticks, “following in the footsteps of Eratosthenes” Emmanuel Di Folco David Jasmin Since September 2000, hundreds of classes from primary and secondary schools have been participating in an international cooperative project organised by “La main à la pâte”. The objective is to enable pupils to measure the size of our planet. Reproducing in this way the historical experiment of the Greek scientist Eratosthenes, they measure the shadow of a vertical stick (also called “gnomon”) at midday in the sun, and exchange their results via the internet with a partner situated at a different latitude but a known distance away.

They obtain the circumference of the Earth by using a simple calculation.