Using a historical controversy in a learning context: the case of a «didactic engineering» elaborated from Galileo’s «Dialogue Concerning The Two Chief World Systems»

Abstract

It is difficult for common sense to admit that an object dropped from the top of the mast of a ship moving at a constant velocity falls down at the bottom of the mast because it keeps within the horizontal movement of the ship. This difficulty is similar to the one faced by early scientists from the pre-classical science and staged by Galileo in his Dialogue Concerning The Two Chief World Systems. This proximity leads us to elaborate a learning pathway in which some elements of Galileo’s dialogue are selected and reorganized according to specific educational constraints. The relevance of the teaching-learning sequence is asserted by the ‘didactic engineering’ framework and leans on the identification of students with the characters staged by Galileo.