Old and Current Techniques in Secondary School Teaching: The Eratosthene's Measure

The technological solutions continuously proposed by the market, also for the teaching applications, are more and more sophisticated. The result is that more time is actually spent on learning the tools than in exploiting the didactic content that may be contained in the programs themselves. What we have tried to do is to get students to use the most economic, easy, essential, and where possible, state-of-the art, technologies. We have designed and realised a project which consists in reproducing the experience of Eratosthenes, who measured the terrestrial meridian more than 2200 years ago and whose results only differ by 0.8% from current findings. This work shows how, using a suitable mix of old and current technologies, it is possible to obtain formative results with a current value.