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This poster presents the outcomes of the first two years of a three-year project exploring and refiningthe use of educational robotics to engage young people in STEM education. It shows the developmentof activity plans which leverage constructionist concepts such as powerful ideas, objects to think withand the construction and sharing of personally meaningful artefacts in order to explore, test and extendunderstanding within STEM domains. Workshops in which these activity plans have been tested andrefined, have so farengaged over 3,000 children between the ages of 7 and 18 in six European countries. Additionally, conferences and competitions for young people have been held each year wherethey compete and collaborate with others. These workshops and competitions have been systematicallyevaluated through QUAL+quant mixed methods, in order to inform the development of future activitiesand refinement of existing ones. Through this process we identify key components of successfuleducational robotics activities for STEM education. These have, in-turn, informed the design of aframework for educational robotics. The activity plans have informed the bottom-up development of ageneric curriculum for educational robotics in STEM and are available on a dedicated repository. Thisposter presents a snapshot of each of these project outcomes.&nbsp

This document is a report which outlines and explains all the steps undertaken to identify, create and deploy the ER4STEM repository in relation to Work Package 5, titled “Technology for Educational Robotics”. The ER4STEM educational repository is aimed at teachers, robotics practitioners and researchers across Europe to help make resources for robotics in education easily available and helps educators make use of robotics during their lessons.

This document presents the preparations, description and proceedings of the European Conference on Educational Robotics (ECER) 2018, which took place between the 16th to 20th April in Qawra, Malta.

This paper and its corresponding poster present a “work in progress” concept for the visualization of 19 activity plans, into a generic curriculum map for teaching STEM concepts through constructionist robotics activities. There are six educational paths that represent potential use cases and these have been validated through 148 educational robotics workshops implemented with children between the ages of 7 and 18 in six European countries.

This deliverable presents the process that was executed to determine best practices and requirements in educational robotics. The extensive research shows that existing approaches have gaps in the description and implementation of activities to be comparable, replicable and engaging to all children. Additionally, approaches are mostly outside of schools, defragmented and unconnected; knowledge is scarcely well transferred. The educational robotics community needs a common solution that addresses these gaps. The ER4STEM framework will be based on the identified needs and become the catalyst to improve young people’s learning experience through the use of robotics in formal and informal spaces. It will bring the educational robotics community forward by creating processes, tools and artefacts that allow the use of robots in learning spaces so that a creative and critical use of educational robotics is realized to maintain children’s curiosity in the world. A first step for a common solution is the understanding of the different stakeholders and their needs. Thus, this document analyses the stakeholders that affect and are affected by educational robotics activities. Furthermore, the need for a common process to identify best practices is addressed. The newly developed activity plan for educational robotics (a tool of the framework) is based on profound research and experience on pedagogical methodologies, and has been used by all consortium partners to describe their educational robotics activities. Following the identification of the stakeholders’ needs and the development and testing of the activity plan, newly developed parameters and criteria are presented to determine good practices in educational robotics. Based on the identified needs, first ideas on the ER4STEM framework are given as an outlook.

This deliverable describes the specific objective of the framework, which is to help people create robotic activities. To achieve this, the framework introduces a macro-process that later is adapted to each one of the stakeholders’ needs (i.e. teachers, organizers of educational activities, and educational researchers) identified in the D1.1. In this first version of the framework just two processes are developed (i) designing a pedagogical activity and (ii) implementing a conference.

This deliverable reports on the final version of the ER4STEM framework, which is the result of three-years of improvement and iteration based on the continuous contribution of WP 2, WP3, WP4, WP 5 and WP6. Consequently, this document could be considered as an organizer and a window to the work done throughout the ER4STEM project’s implementation period. The framework aims to make explicit the connection between pedagogical strategies, robotics and 21st century skills providing processes and tools to guide stakeholders along the critical use of robotics in education. Moreover, it situates the educational use of robotics in constructionist learning activities for children both inside and outside of school in which, they: Collaborate within and between teams Creatively engage with challenges in STEM domains Engage in critical thinking through reflection Have opportunities to learn how to recover from failure Gain a sense of achievement These activities are taking place in shared spaces with mediating artefacts (aka robots), teachers and children are able to challenge existing classroom norms and attitudes towards learning (in STEM and in general), in order to develop and maintain young people’s interest in STEM subjects and careers. To achieve this, the ER4STEM framework provides four components that are the result of the work done throughout the project: ER4STEM Glossary, (ER4STEM Glossary) Tools: ER4STEM web-repository (WP 5) (ER4STEM Repository), ER4STEM activity plan template and activity blocks (WP 4) (ER4STEM Activity Plan Template), and ER4STEM generic curriculum (WP 2) (ER4STEM Generic Curriculum) ER4STEM pedagogical principles (ER4STEM Pedagogical Principles) Processes for the delivery of Educational Robotics Educational Robotics Workshops (WP 2 – D2.3) and Conferences (WP 3 – D 3.3) for young learners (ER4STEM Processes).

This document is a report based on the 2 workshops completed by AcrossLimits together with the SCIENTIX ambassadors and/or SCIENTIX National Contact Points to explain how to use the educational repository works ” of Work Package 5, titled “Technology for Educational Robotics”. As part of this work package a state-of-the-art repository was built in support to other deliverables. The aim of the workshops was to ensure that educators, teachers and researchers across Europe get to know about how they can make use of the repository, as well other outcomes of the project.