The ultimate goal of the project is to develop a strategic partnership and later - a self-sustained professional community in the intersection of Educational Robotics and Augmented reality. All activities related to the production of IOs, all other tangible and intangible results, all events, and other activities will contribute to this goal. The Educational Robotics at Schools Online with Augmented Reality - eROBSON project is motivated by the need to enable teaching educational robotics and other STEM topics in online and blended modes supported by digital tools. This need has been highlighted by the outbreak of the COVID19 pandemic.Educational Robotics is a term to describe educational approaches that use platforms such as Arduino, LittleBits and Mindstorms for STEM education. These approaches traditionally depend on face-to-face activities in laboratory environments and on the availability of special equipment and consumables.eROBSON proposes a new approach of delivering laboratory courses. The approach is of low implementation cost, easy to adopt and has a zero risk of transmitting COVID19 or other viruses. The approach suggests using Augmented Reality to simulate the necessary lab equipment and the hands-on interaction with it. Augmented Reality is a technology that enhances human perception with additional, computer-generated sensorial input to create a new user experience.The main objectives of the project are as follows. First, to enable teaching of educational robotics and STEM subjects in the context of COVID19 pandemic by (a) creating new pedagogical approaches for conducting practical hands-on learning activities in online and blended modes, (b) designing an original approach of using AR-enhanced simulations of different educational robotics platforms, and (c) designing a methodology that includes pedagogical approaches, technological solutions, and processes. Second, to facilitate capacity building among STEM teachers by (a) designing dedicated teacher training materials in a form of a teacher guide and (b) organizing teacher training workshops. Third, to improve the quality of STEM education across Europe by (a) producing educational robotics materials for schools and (b) piloting STEM educational activities that are not available in the pandemic.The main target group of the project is school pupils studying STEM subjects. Some of the results target school teachers of STEM and science education and aim to provide the necessary guidance and the necessary tools to implement the proposed approach in the real classroom.The design of the project is guided by European policies, strategies, and tools. The project aims to improve the digital competence of educators and subsequently their students by developing a comprehensive set of educational resources that can be used for remote teaching of practical STEM subjects, are open and accessible online (EU initiative “Opening Up Education”). The project follows the “Digital Learning & ICT in Education” 2018 and “Digital Education Action Plan” 2018 by promoting innovative technology-enhanced learning practices which are rapidly becoming the new mainstream during the COVID19 pandemic. The project aims to enable new pedagogical approaches that provide an engaging and effective digital substitute to the traditional learning in the lab, making lab-based learning possible during a pandemic and generally more accessible in any context. All results and materials designed in the project will be evaluated, widely disseminated and available online as OERs.The project is guided by the European skills frameworks: “Digital skills framework” and the “Digital Competence Framework for Educators (DigCompEdu) by involving teachers into the process of designing educational materials and providing a framework with universal building blocks with practical guidelines on both creating new materials and using them in teaching.The project supports the ”EU Cohesion Policy”, focusing on social inclusion according to students' requirements and preferences based on the UN definition of inclusion. The eROBSON project includes five Intellectual Outputs. The partners will organize three Multiplier Events and three Learning/Teaching/Training activities in order to effectively fulfill its objectives. eROBSON’s main impact will be to transform interactive robotics teaching to remote teaching scenarios. The project will produce the tools, guidelines, and validated examples of educational materials to help educators to perform interactive teaching in the field of educational robotics remotely by means of Augmented Reality.

"Das Projekt TACTIDE „TeAching Computational ThinkIng with Digital dEvices"" befasste sich mit der Unterstützung und Befähigung der Lehrenden, Problemlösestrategien mit Hilfe digitaler Devices innerhalb des Regel- und Projektunterrichts sowie extrakurrikularer Aktivitäten zu integrieren. Hierbei war von Anfang an das Ziel sich nicht auf ein spezifisiches Fach zu konzentrieren, sondern es wurden explizit verschiedene Fächer mit einbezogen und fächerübergreifende Lernszenarien entwickelt, um die Digitalisierung in Schule zu begleiten und Kompetenzen zum Problemlösen mit Hilfe von digitalen Werkzeugen allen SchülerInnen näher zu bringen. Insbesondere fokussierten wir hierbei nicht nur diejenigen SchülerInnen, die sich ohnehin durch ihre Fächerwahl schon mit dieser Thematik beschäftigen. Vielmehr war das Ziel das Thema Computational Thinking auch in eher untypische Fächer, wie z.B. Biologie, einzubringen und zu erlaube fächerübergreifend Computational Thinking Skills zu unterrichten. Der allgemeine digitale Wandel macht auch weiterhin die Notwendigkeit für den Umgang mit den 21st Century Skills und den damit einhergehenden Fähigkeiten wie dem Computational Thinking dringend erforderlich. Hierzu ist ebenfalls ein digitaler Wandel in unserer Schulbildung notwendig, um die ArbeiterInnen von morgen hinreichend auf die neuen Anforderungen der Berufswelt der Zukunft vorzubereiten. Daher muss die Vermittlung und Integration der „21st Century Skills“ in Schule dringend gestärkt werden. Hierzu ist es sinnvoll, an der Förderung von Kompetenzen anzusetzen, die in der automatisierten Welt notwendig sind. Dies sind die Projektpartner über Aspekt der Förderung von Problemlösekompetenzen mit Hilfe von digitalen Devices (Microcontollern) wie z.B. Microbit und Calliope mini angegangen.Hierzu wurden zunächst Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede in den Lehrplänen und Ansätzen der beteiligten Länder verglichen. Danach wurden Pilotprojekte länderübergreifend entwickelt. In einem nächsten Schritt wurde analysiert inwieweit die LehrerInnen befähigt werden müssen die entwickelten Szenarien umzusetzen, bzw. wie diese skalierbar, primär in Bezug auf die Leistungsfähigkeit der Lernenden, umgesetzt werden können.Im Anschluss daran wurden alle Projekte in einem entsprechenden LMS für die weitere Verwendung angeboten. Anhand der Materialien und der Fortbildungen wird das Lehrpersonal unterschiedlicher Fächer selbst geschult und befähigt digitale Inhalte in ihren Unterricht zu integrieren und Problemlösestrategien mit Hilfe digitaler Werkzeuge, im Sinne des Computational Thinking, zu unterrichten."

Our society heavily depends on software in almost every area of life, ranging e.g. from social-media apps installed on millions of mobile devices up to life-critical software in the automotive or avionic sector. Because we are so dependent on software, it is important that it functions correctly, can be maintained and, because it is used in many different contexts and operated by humans, is robust. Unfortunately, this is not the reality. Although tools and techniques exist which are well known to improve software quality, today's programmers seem reluctant to use them.One reason for this mismatch is that techniques for quality assurance and, in particular, software testing are often isolated topics, placed late in the curriculum for software engineering or general computer science studies. For example, students often do not test their code, hardly formulate specifications, leave out documentation and ignore style conventions. Consequently, students do not practice to write high-quality code.To counter this, the objective of the QPED project is to demand proper tests as early in the education as possible, to foster a quality-awareness in students that goes beyond functional correctness as demonstrated by testing; they will also start thinking about better readable and more robust code. To ensure that testing and paying attention to code quality is not only taught early, but also performed by students from the beginning, we will provide support to students in the form of procedural guidance and a feedback toolkit. The feedback toolkit can also ensure that only code meeting minimal quality standards is allowed to be submitted as a solution to further stipulate the quality-awareness.Changing software engineering education with respect to an emphasis on testing, procedures and feedback for code-quality-related topics, intends to stipulate a quality mindset from the beginning in the future software engineers' education. They will be fully aware of the relevance of quality aspects of software and they will habitually apply them. This will result in a noticeable increase in software quality within Europe.To avoid putting an additional burden on lecturers for changing their course design and providing the necessary support to students, we will develop open teaching and learning material as well as an openly accessible feedback toolkit. These will be ready-to-use for students and lecturers with a focus on making them configurable to meet the needs of a wide variety of teaching contexts. For example, our material and toolkit will not make a strict choice of a programming language to be used in the courses, but we will support the most common object-oriented and imperative programming languages, such as Java, Python or C. Different teaching methods will also be supported, for instance traditional as well as distance teaching universities will be considered.To reach these goals, the QPED project will concretely develop the following intellectual outputs:Course design blueprint: A course design blueprint will be developed to help adapting existing first-year software-engineering courses to incorporate testing earlier and more pervasively. This will be underpinned by ready-to-use educational material such as lecture notes, slides, elaborated examples, exercises and lab sessions.Procedural guidance: Stepwise guides will be developed for a wide range of complex development tasks focusing on code quality. Examples will be provided for teaching material to introduce these guides.Feedback toolkit: A toolkit will be developed to provide uniform access to a variety of quality checks. The feedback from multiple checks will be presented comprehensibly and uniformly to students. Lecturers will be able to easily configure the toolkit to their needs and quality requirements.Pilot studies: We will evaluate the success of our approach in pilot studies carried out in a first-year software-engineering course at four universities.

The COVID-19 crisis has made universities switch to digital education and to re-organize their campus. In the May 2020 surveys of the European Commission, it turned out that in the first (semi-) lockdown period, 95,1% of the universities organized online and distance learning and 82,7% even online exams. All institutions set-up massive support for organizing online lectures, tutorials and videoconferencing with diverse pedagogical approaches. At all levels, emergency decisions were made. In the second wave of COVID-19, many universities wanted to keep students on campus for face to face teaching. After a few weeks only, this seemed impossible as Europe coloured red again. Universities allowed only half or one fifth of the students in face-to-face lectures, while others attended online. Now, most universities have to go in a complete lockdown again with online and distance education. Teaching staff feel this as a disruption, requiring an extreme workload to adapt to the situation. Students started to manifest for the right of having “quality education”. Watching a video or following a lesson via zoom is no longer felt as a solution as it was in the first wave. This is where the DigiTeL Pro Strategic Partnership (Professional Development for Digital Teaching and Learning) comes in. It brings together excellent groups of experts from universities, well-known for research and innovation in digital education and having developed good practices in digital solutions during the Corona crisis. They are prepared to valorise their expertise in continuous professional development courses (CPD) in order to reinforce the ability of universities to provide high quality, inclusive digital education. They are at the edge of expertise in teaching and learning scenarios, connecting with main trends in practices observed during the crisis, and in the student learning experience: - synchronous hybrid learning: based on settings that have in common that both on-site or ‘here’ students and remote or ‘there’ students are simultaneously included (synchronous hybrid learning (KU Leuven-imec); - blended learning: based on a course design with a deliberate combination of online and offline learning activities (EMBED strategic partnership, TU Delft, KU Leuven); - online and distance learning: based on a course design with a continuous physical separation between teacher and learner, synchronously and asynchronously (OUNL, UOC, UNINETTUNO);- student readiness for digital learning (NIDL, Dublin City University); - Institutional policies and strategies: based on maturity dimensions in institutional policies and quality assurance approaches for digital education (EADTU, EMBED and e-xcellence partnerships). In the DigiTeL Pro partnership, these groups interact and cooperate for cross-development and improvement. Objectives are: - to explore and forecast educational needs of teaching staff and learners within and after the COVID+ era; -to exchange expertise between researchers and innovators on synchronous hybrid, blended and online distance learning, optimizing models and guidelines for short-term and future CPD; -to design, plan and develop continuing education courses enabling anyone involved in course and curriculum development in adapting to hybrid, blended and online distance learning; -to empower student readiness for digital learning by an online course and integrating the “student voice” in all learning scenarios; - to reinforce the ability of universities to provide high quality, inclusive and scalable digital education. By doing this, DigiTel Pro enables universities and EUI alliances to respond to the unstable reality in which we are living, keeping all learners included and leaving nobody behind in this disruptive challenge. The partnership will design, develop and implement three CPD courses on respectively synchronous hybrid, blended and online teaching and learning for anyone involved in digital course and curriculum development for leaders steering this process. They will optimize models, guidelines and pedagogies leading to mature and high quality education. A course has a modular structure and will be designed in alignment with the needs of universities, strong educational concepts and relevant learning objectives.This will accelerate the Modernization Agenda and the digital transformation of education systems across Europe (the new Digital Education Action Plan and the report on the European Education Area 2025), supporting ultimately the Green Deal.

"Read4Succeed is a transnational cooperation project developed by a consortium of 10 partners, including universities, schools, non-profit associations and Reading Education Assistance Dogs (R.E.A.D.) teams from six European countries (Portugal, Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and Spain). The objective of the project is to meet the objectives set by the European Union and the partner countries, as it aims to make schools more inclusive, ie to develop strategies in order to properly host in their communities’ children with multicultural and multilingual differences. In the last decades, European societies have become increasingly diverse, mainly due to intra-European mobility and immigration flows from third countries, particularly from African countries. By 2015, about 10% of the EU population were migrants, 5% of whom were under 15 years of age. Sudden migratory flows can have a negative impact on education systems, jeopardizing the integration process of migrant and refugee children and creating tensions between host communities. On the other hand, teachers face new challenges and seek appropriate strategies and responses to these new realities. Moreover, children have to face negative prejudices related to their migratory condition, low reading skills in the language of the host country, psychological barriers, or insufficient family and community support, which translate into higher rates of failure and early school leaving. However, children from deprived socio-economic backgrounds may have even lower school outcomes than those coming from a migratory context. Education plays a very important role in society because of its benefits. It contributes not only to how citizens understand the society in which they live, but also to empower children with skills that will help them to take advantage of opportunities to break cycles of chronic poverty. The integration of these children into the education system thus plays an important role for social inclusion in the host community, not only for themselves but also for their families. Among the main barriers that determines this integration is the lack of knowledge of the host country language, since it significantly limits communication. Some children undergo negative experiences regarding their difficulties and may have developed fears, expectations of failure, and negative feelings about the tasks they are seeking. Including a therapy dog when children read aloud promotes a more enjoyable reading environment, which will have positive impacts on self-confidence and self-esteem, an increase in reading fluency, and an increase in motivation to learn. Read4Succeed intends to evaluate the use of Animal Assisted Education, on the enhancement of reading skills acquisition of migrant, refugee and from deprived neighbourhood children between the ages of 7 and 10, enrolled in primary schools, with reading difficulties identified by their teachers. They will benefit from Dog Assisted Reading sessions, led by R.E.A.D. teams. Using a specially trained dog, the R.E.A.D. promotes an innovative concept in a school environment: children can be the dog's ""teachers"" and teach them how to overcome their difficulties. Each child reads individually to ""someone"" who does not judge or criticize them. On the contrary, the dog is always happy to see the child, prepared to listen to her read at her own pace and is less intimidating than an adult. At the end of a year of intervention, the reading skills of these children will be assessed through an instrument created by the consortium to be applied in all the countries involved. This will allow a comparison of the results that will serve as the basis for the writing of a scientific article one intellectual output of the project. In addition, a short story book and an interactive game will be available at the end of the project so that children can continue to improve their skills outside of school. The project is expected to show that holistic approaches, that combine formal and non-formal education, can be useful when solutions need to be found, for complex situations such as those of the children from the target groups. These solutions will be discussed on the eHandbook about Animal Assisted Education, another intellectual output on this project."