A pioneer educational aid for the learning of the first notions of geometry: Jules Dalsème’s Matériel-Atlas (1882)

This workshop is inspired by the work of the French normal school teacher Jules Dalséme (1845-1904) and is addressed to primary and lower secondary school teachers (future and in-service ones) and it also stems from Ilaria Zannoni’s master’s degree thesis and internship work, (Zannoni 2018), addressed to 4th to 7th grade pupils, enti- tled “Geometry as the beginning of scientific thinking: observing, moving, comparing, drawing, representing”. Dalséme's Éléments de Takymétrie (géométrie naturelle): à l’usage des instituteurs primaires, des écoles professionnelles, des agents des travaux public, etc (1880) presents an original way to teaching geometry to children, going be- yond the simple numeracy and proximate to synthetic Euclidean geometry. His goal was to encourage and make science more accessible for everybody, in the spirit of the intentions of the French Third Republic state education. Participants are engaged in hands-on activities taken from the educational aid Matériel-Atlas (1882), to calculate the volume of an object commonly found in construction sites.