ER4STEM Student Conferences

Within the project ERSTEM, three issues of the European Conference on Educational Robotics (ECER) were organized in the years 2016, 2017 and 2018. The ECER is an international scientific robotics conference for students, commonly aged 15-19 years. It provides an opportunity for them to prepare and present their artefacts and ideas to each other and to professional researchers. The basic idea is to provide a chance for the students to show what they have been empowered to achieve.

Within ER4STEM, a conference plan was developed, which is based on the experiences of organizing the ECER. The purpose is to provide a generic plan on how to organize such a student conference. The conference plan provides a sequence of activities that should be performed by conference organizers prior to the actual event. It is divided into 4 phases:

1. The initiation phase is concerned with finding a host of the conference and defining the main topic(s).
2. The preparation phase encompasses planning the activities and required resources for the conference. Besides, during this phase an awareness campaign should be carried out for reaching out to possible contributors and participants.
3. The execution phase incorporates the detailed organization prior to the conference as well as its actual implementation.
4. Finally, the closure phase is concerned with the evaluation of results and impact.

The detailed conference plan is described in deliverable D3.4. Despite being intended for conferences with a technical topic like educational robotics, the described organization process can also generally be viewed as guideline for any student conference.