March 21, 2006

Dear Fellow Researchers,

We are students in 6^th grade from MacKinnon Middle School in Wharton, New Jersey. We are very excited to do the Noonday Project with you. We have been researching about this project for many months. We learned how Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the Earth with only a well, paper, a plumb, a protractor, a bucket of sand, the sun’s rays, and the shadows. Hopefully we will be successful just like Eratosthenes was.

Eratosthenes was from a Greece city called Cyrene. He was very curious and suspicious about everything he saw when he was a child. He went to school when he was six-years-old in a building called a gymnasium. He went to Alexandria to see the library with all the information in the world. He wanted to create one giant scroll instead of having many smaller ones. Once he started, he noticed that he didn’t have one portion of information that he needed to complete the scroll. He needed to know the circumference of the Earth, which had never been found. He thought of many ways to find the answer, but all of them failed. He finally discovered a well that didn’t have a shadow that could help him find his answer. Soon, he got the answer to this mystery.

My group has five members that will assist and support each other greatly. We will also get help from our teachers; Mrs. Leary who runs the entire project, Mr. McGrail who is a math teacher, and Ms. Corbett who is also a math teacher. We will have to work with each other to complete this project and see if we get results related to your school’s measurement. The entire 6^th grade will be doing this project at the same time so we can have similar results and we will be comparing their results with your school. At noon, we will be beginning our project for the measure of the shadow at high noon.

We were finally able to witness how Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the Earth. My group had some difficulties because the wind was blowing the stick in many directions, so the size of the shadow was incorrect in the beginning of the project. Shortly, our measurements were correct. Instead of the shadows increasing while going closer to high noon, they became shorter. Our central angle was 35 degrees. We hope you enjoyed this difficult project as greatly as we did.

We found out that your school is only 306 miles away from ours. Going from Wharton to Chesapeake, we would have to go 198.3 degrees south-southwest. Going from Chesapeake to Wharton, you would have to go 17.2 degrees north-northeast. Our circumference of the Earth was 40,520 miles. I hope yours was close to the real distance!

Sincerely,

Hemal, David, John, Kim, Nicole