by Rita Trombini, ART-ER

It is a pleasure for ART-ER to collaborate with ALL DIGITAL in the organization of the 2019 Summit. This meeting will be an opportunity for us to give visibility to our new activities on STEAM education, to learn about new trends and to network with other organisations who are working on these issues.

ART-ER, born recently from the merger of two long-established Emilia-Romagna regional government’s agencies ERVET (regional development) and ASTER (research and technology), has contributed to the digital inclusion project ‘Pane e Internet‘  for many years and is now coordinating STEM education projects in secondary schools, with a particular focus on fighting the gender gap.

As a 100% agency owned by the Emilia-Romagna regional government (RER), ART-ER (former Ervet) has supported RER for over 10 years on regional information society policies, especially through its benchmarking activity of e-government services and other digital developments in Emilia Romagna and its collaboration with the Pane e Internet project.

With the launch of the regional digital agenda ADER, ART-ER took charge of the Competences axis and contributed to the preparation of the Memorandum of Understanding between RER and national Ministry of Education, which was signed in June 2016 in the framework of the “National Digital School Plan”. The Memorandum commits RER to facilitating the diffusion of digital innovation in all schools, including those in peripheral areas, and to developing educational measures to fight gender stereotypes and the ensuing gaps in digital education and STEAM disciplines.

To translate these goals into practice, ART-ER has carried out different activities:

• technical labs targeting female students in first level secondary schools (about 160 attended) during the 2017 and 2018 annual Festival of technical culture of Bologna Metropolitan City. These labs focused on arts and technology, 3D modelling, Scratch, “social photowalk” with digital storytelling about organic wine production, cycling mechanics and the culture of sustainable mobility and other topics;
• practical labs on open data competences, carried out in 2018 and 2019 in collaboration with Golinelli Foundation, for second level secondary school students (about 200 attended). These labs addressed topics such as public ethics, fake news, Italian cultural heritage, territory and environment, gender discrimination and others;
• the La Carovana STEM project, launched in April 2019, which builds on those previous experiences to further enrich and extend them throughout the region, and to experiment with innovative approaches, such as residential Summer camps in the Romagna sea coast and in the Apennines mountains.

It is important to highlight that ART-ER designs and carries out all these activities in close collaboration with the regional school office (USR) of the national Ministry of education; in particular with USR Emilia-Romagna’s Servizio Marconi, based in Bologna, which has a significant expertise in digital education. Thanks to this collaboration, the above ART-ER labs always include also awareness and/or training activities for the teachers of the schools involved. To run and deliver the labs, ART-ER collaborates with the staff of the numerous FabLabs and other organisations running non-formal digital education activities across Emilia Romagna.

We are keen on presenting more in details the above activities and to hear and learn from the Summit’s participants about their own experience in this field. In particular, we are very interested on methodologies to evaluate the impact of digital education activities on young people’s learning achievements, on gender stereotypes and other cultural and social aspects which are important to develop a full digital citizenship.

So, welcome to Bologna and Emilia Romagna! To follow ART-ER’s digital activities you can click here!