Completed

Motivating EU students to choosing STEM studies & careers and improving their performance in courses related to STEM education

Project Summary:

 EL-STEM aims at fostering an innovation “ecosystem” in European secondary schools (ages 12-18) that can facilitate more effective and efficient user-centric design and use of AR/MR resources for personalised STEM learning and teaching. The project will develop, pilot test, and implement an innovative professional development program that will familiarize teachers with the potential of AR technology for enhancing instructional practices and students’ motivation and learning processes in secondary STEM education. Teachers will be acquainted with ways in which they could employ AR (but also VR/MR) to promote students’ engagement in STEM education and to strengthen their 21st century skills.

Funding Organization: European Commission –Erasmus+ / KA2, Strategic Partnerships for School Education (Ref. #: 2017-1-CY01-KA201-026775)

Project duration: September 2017 – June 2020

Project Website: http://elstem.eu/

Project Summary:

“STEMitUP” refers to the idiom “Spice it up” that means “make something more interesting or exciting”. STEMitUP aims at developing a state-of-the-art comprehensive educational programme that will fill STEM teachers’ quiver with innovative and fun pedagogical tools. The overall aim is to make STEM-related courses fun and interesting for students of lower secondary schools aged 11-15 and strategically plant a “seed of interest” that could grow into an exciting and rewarding STEM entrepreneurship career. A fusion of two interrelated fields will take place: stimulating entrepreneurship and encouraging STEM uptake at the same time. Adding an entrepreneurial layer to STEM education will help youth apply STEM to solve real-world problems, to think in a creative and innovative way and at the same time to benefit their communities.

Funding Organization: European Commission –Erasmus+ / KA2, Strategic Partnerships for School Education (Ref. #: 2017-1-NO01-KA201-034201)

Project duration: September 2017 – August 2019

Project Website: https://www.stemitup.eu/

The aim of the project is to establish in Cyprus a Science and Research Center to:

• Undertake competitive interdisciplinary research of excellence for the development of innovative tools and exhibits for Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics (STEAM) Education and Science Communication.
• Promote science literacy and capacity building through informal STEAM Education using interactive Science Technology and Engineering (STE) exhibits, demonstrations and contact with scientists.
• Contribute towards a Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) culture through open schooling, Science Communication and outreach activities.
• Provide teacher professional training for integrating in-house developed ICT tools in formal STEAM Education and promote endorsement of new STEAM educational strategies and curricula.
• Serve as a hub to communicate and disseminate to public and industry innovative technology research outcomes and evidence-based practice to policy makers and provide a platform for entrepreneurship for supporting public engagement in entrepreneurship and start-up companies.

Research excellence and innovation will be attained through “Teaming” collaborations, exchange visits and networking with EU Centers of Excellence in ICT research and STEAM Education, and with renowned Science Centers and the public and private universities of Cyprus. The Center will work with academics, expert in various fields, and employ staff and researchers with expertise in Computer Science and ICT, STEAM Education and Science Communication. An entrepreneurship unit hosting a prototyping platform for innovation will be used for dissemination of research outcomes, advising innovative patents, promoting start-ups and establishing links with the industry. The Center will be a unique landmark with a positive long term impact on innovation, Cyprus economic growth and Education, in accordance with “Europe 2020”, and adhering to the objectives of the Teaming Phase I Call.

Funding Organization: European Commission – H2020-WIDESPREAD-04-2017-TeamingPhase1/ WIDESPREAD-04-2017 (Ref. #: 763594)

Project duration: September 2017 – August 2018

Project Website: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/763594

Project Jupyter@edu tests and implements innovative practices in the field of higher education. Moreover it supports synergies with research and innovation activities and promotes new technologies as drivers of improvements in education. Today’s cloud technology allows comfortable work in almost any discipline with just a web browser. Open scientific software is not an exception. There are solutions providing way of doing numerical computations, scientific visualization, computer algebra and data processing from within a modern browser. There is only one problem to solve – one has to run the cloud service.

The MAIN OBJECTIVE of the project is to deploy of cloud based services for numerical and mathematical scientific explorations in the period of 10.2017-11.2019, equip it with modern tools like grading system and mutually motivate and engage to use it.

The specific objectives:

• Strengthening the cooperation between partner institutions , increasing their internationalization through the exchange of good practice and to jointly develop universal teaching materials.
• Promotion of the idea of open education and open software
• Enhancing the quality and relevance of students’ knowledge.

International consortium will work on the following intellectual outputs:

O1 – Jupyter notebook server – the deployment in Centre for Applied Sciences

O2 – Deployment of Python based teaching materials for courses in science education

O3 – Use of unit tests in Jupyter notebooks for teaching in computer science and computational science.

EUC, as a partner, will play an important role in enhancing the quality and relevance of students’ knowledge and skills and in this way improving the quality of education. EUC will also be part of the deployment of a scalable cloud platform serving Jupyter notebooks.

With low unemployment rates and high demand across a variety of regions and vertical markets, the IT job market is among the most robust in Europe in 2015. Topping the list of must-have IT professionals for companies wanting to build new products or develop proprietary internal systems, are software developers and software engineers. However, the current supply of the educational system does not match either the quality or the quantity of the outstripping growth of the ICT sector requirements. An additional concern from the quality aspect is the lack of qualified teachers for software development courses. In order to address these issues, European University Cyprus participates in a consortium of vocational schools, employers and educational staff, who will be brought together to develop a training course aimed at educating students in becoming junior software developers. At its outset, the program will focus on identifying the true educational and organizational needs of the software engineering market, as well as on establishing the theoretical and methodological foundation in software development with respect to VET school graduates. Based on these findings, a course accompanied with a handbook of learning material and resources, will be designed and timely delivered to selected teaching personnel. The project will develop common learning materials for an EQF level 4 VET school software development course to guarantee the best possible teaching quality and learning outcomes of the study program. The next step will be to train VET teachers, with the aim of complementing their skills and knowledge on the topic and of familiarizing them with the current labour market needs. The training program will be developed in close collaboration with employers, working specialists, and will additionally include an apprenticeship. The project deliverables will be the product of joint effort between (i) European University Cyprus; (ii) CEIPES, a center for the promotion of education and development based in Italy; and (iii) BCS Koolitus, an Esthonian ICT training and consulting company.

Google’s CS4HS initiative is an annual grant program promoting computer science education worldwide. In particular, CS4HS supports colleges and universities in their efforts to provide professional development training for local high school and middle school teachers. The ICTEE laboratory team, led by Mr. Pericles Cheng, and also including Dr. George Christou and Dr. Konstantinos Katzis, will design and implement a Training of Trainers course which will introduce Cypriot high-school teachers to the use of robotic platforms (NXT Lego Robots), for the purpose of teaching programming principles to their students.

The wider objective of this project is to increase attractiveness of engineering education through innovative teaching methods as well as through the strengthening of university- secondary vocational schools collaboration The specific objectives, which the project shall achieve, are the following:

• To build cross-universities network of remote engineering laboratories in order to enhance engineering education at Serbian HE institutions
• To strengthen university-secondary vocational schools collaboration through secondary vocational schools teacher training in using resources of The Library of Remote Experiments
• To bring remote engineering experiments into secondary vocational school classrooms in order to promote engineering education attractiveness to prospective engineering students.

The development of digital skills is important for the inclusion and participation, further learning, employability, emancipation and active citizenship and self-fulfilment of people with disabilities. ENTELIS, a KA3 ICT Multilateral Network, aims to address issues of reducing the digital divide, especially for people with disabilities of all ages, and to increase participation and social inclusion, by creating a sustainable network of significant stakeholders in digital competence acquisition of people with disabilities. The project will promote the quality and quantity of opportunities for learners with disabilities, by sharing experiences and expertise and by providing policymakers, and the entire community committed to support people with disabilities, with foresight scenario’s and roadmaps. The role of assistive technology in educational processes will be a central issue in this project, although also mainstream ICT and accessibility issues will be addressed.

The SimSchool Modules Project is a project sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE) in collaboration with CurveShift (simSchool) and Pragmatic Solutions, Inc. (Leverage). The project, which has been selected from a field of more than 600 pre-proposals and 50 finalists, aims to enhance the simSchool platform, a ‘flight simulator’ for teachers, to become a fully-realized teacher training platform for higher education. The project has/will develop, pilot test, and disseminate modules for learning to teach via simSchool, through an international network of colleges of education. Participating institutions have been undertaking both local and project-wide collaborative research (e.g. utilize shared protocols, share findings, co-author reports and articles with each other and other simSchool partners). The developed modules provide a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) where instructors can explore instructional strategies, examine classroom management techniques, and practice building relationships with students that will translate into increased learning. Using simSchool enables transformational experiences for teachers to help them become more effective leaders in their schools and learning communities.

The aim of the proposed project is to establish blended learning as an inherent part of the teaching practice in European University Cyprus. In particular, the project has the following main objectives

1. To design, implement and test two prototype (2) blended learning courses

2. To train instructors of European University Cyprus in the design and implementation of blended learning courses

3. To use the experience gained from the implementation of the prototype courses for the design, implementation and testing of a blended learning course for each degree offered by European University Cyprus

The project was implemented by members of the ICT –Enhanced Education (ICTEE) laboratory within the period of two years (2010 – 2012).

The implementation of the Blended Learning project brings European University of Cyprus at the forefront of applied educational technology in Cyprus. While all Cypriot institutions utilize specific ICT educational tools as part of their courses, the implementation of this project resulted in the establishment of the first full-scale use of blended learning methodologies as an inherent part of the educational process.