Artificial Intelligence is no longer the stuff of the future although there's still an inadequate degree of consciousness about it at all levels. Today students can expect to interact with AI in both their personal and professional lives, yet the topic is not explicitly taught in most of our schools and doesn't find an appropriate place in curricula. To prepare them for success with an adequate digital literacy, avoid an increasing digital divide and ensure equal opportunities to everyone, educators need to understand how AI technologies can be leveraged to facilitate learning, accelerate inclusion, solve real-world problems and how teaching can and should change accordingly. Unfortunately there's no relevant offer for teachers PD in this area so far, and best practices examples are very few and hard to find.4 EU schools with very different backgrounds, finalities and levels of expertise, have decided to pool up and collaborate in tackling such a challenge from a bottom up perspective, sharing their own vision for future education and offering their students the opportunity to experience first hand the value of international collaboration at European level enhanced by the participation in both short and long term mobilities abroad.BRAIINS (BRing AI IN Schools) targets students (15-18), teachers and local communities alike. Its main priorities are creation and testing of innovative educational practices in the digital era while increasing interest and level of achievement in STEM and operating for an inclusive school and -consequently-society.Participants will acquire a critical knowledge of AI big ideas; gain awareness of its impact on the fast changing future of work, of the related ethical issues (privacy, data collection, algorithmic bias and their effect on individuals and society, human-machine relationship) together with the new opportunities it offers. They will appreciate the need to rethink education -skills, competences, tools and content- in order to improve the level of achievements through new didactical methodologies and AI based personalized adaptive learning and favour inclusion (gender equity, low achievers in traditional learning, special needs students,migrants) They will also identify AI that can be used to make the burden lighter for teachers: AES, personal tutors, expert systems, language expert support thus favouring a shift in teachers role from transmission model to facilitators.Working with humanoid robots will be a core section of the project as human-machine relationship will be a critical point in the near future, dense with ethical and social implications. With their human-like appearance and physical presence such robots call for a more natural and intuitive interaction, are highly motivating for all students and have proved particularly effective with special needs kids in their engagement and for the improvement of cognitive tasks and social abilities.Furthermore they call for a cross-field approach, involving a multiplicity of areas from language empowerment to STEM with an emphasis on coding. They promote new teaching & learning approaches and methodologies such as problem solving, real tasks and challenge based learning, team working, design thinking, civic engagement contextually developing 21st century skills and new competences like critical and lateral thinking, creativity, capacity to tackle problems through algorithms, take decisions in uncertainty based on data and probabilistic models.Driven by the same idea of sharing and giving back to society that will make dissemination a major focus of the project along with being an ethical guideline for students, great attention will also be paid to open source solutions in the strive for affordability and sustainability of results.PD Workshops, webinars, a thematic group in eTwinning, a Moodle course, participation to Conferences and a final International Teachers Summer School will all be vehicles to dissemination at local, national and international level.A set of innovative best practices on AI implementation in the classroom for teachers' productivity, students ' personalized learning, curriculum enhancement plus strategies for inclusion of special needs students and language empowerment and faster integration of migrants will be shared freely as OER to promote critically renovated curricula.Schools are major actors in disseminating culture and innovation in society. BRAIINS will also set the scene for the understanding of the AI future scenarios within the local communities. Students in a service learning logic will engage with the public to make them reflect on AI Imagery and related message, unveiling how AI technologies are already embedded in many different aspects of our lives and how can they benefit humanity together with their drawbacks. Dissemination will be achieved in informal interactive learning environments such as hackathons, exhibitions, robotic courses, contests.

"“Materials Revolution” is in full swing: more innovative materials, from nanotech to simply ""rediscovered"" and enhanced ones, are patented, manufactured and brought to market every day . Many of them are expressly designed to answer the needs of present and future society such as sustainability in building, mobility, water and energy harvesting/storage not to speak of the progressive integration between technologies and communication contributing to the implementation of the Internet of things, ""smart"" objects being simultaneously sensors and actuators applied to maintenance, health care, security,... Such topics are seldom approached at high school level except episodically, with little or no link to the curricula. However innovative materials offer to high school students a cheap, readily available and safe opportunity to be associated with cutting edge research while performing inquiry and project based experimental work within school labs thus encouraging interest in Science, Technology and, more generally, in knowledge-sharing at international level, leading to positive synergies between education, research and manufacturers and developing active and responsible citizenship. The project partners, four high schools from Italy, Ireland, Portugal and Germany, all had a specific interest in Science Education innovation as Science in all its facets is a main part of their curricula. As a consequence they started developing contacts with associations, local firms, research centres and higher education institutions active in the field of innovative materials from whose collaboration the project highly benefitted with an added EU value. The Project activities, partly implemented within traditional subjects to impact didactical practice and innovate science curricula, involved students along 3 lines: 1)studying and sharing what research is up to in the four countries and around the world within two main areas: a) smart materials and the Internet of Things( IoT) and b) materials for sustainability. 2) experimenting with materials properties to complement curricular topics; 3)devising, testing and prototyping new possible applications for such materials, thus boosting students’ innovators potential and entrepreneurship .The extensive employment of programmable microcontrollers + coding while testing and designing activities plus a plurality of ICT tools for collaboration and communication, trained students for the 21st century high-tech society and its sustainability challenges while bringing to a durable & significant impact on the curriculum and didactical practice thanks to the systematical introduction of home/ flipped labs based on low cost sensors + Arduino. Throughout the project students were actively engaged also in a wide range of dissemination activities: in 'peers to peers' mode older students acted as tutors to both the new entries and junior school pupils contributing to the widespread impact of the project within the participating institutions and the neighbouring ones. Outreach also targeted general public both in local communities -with open days, science shows, seminars, exhibitions - and at national/international level with the participation in Makers Faires and other similar activities.Since teachers are universally acknowledged as key players in Science Education innovation, MoM extensively pursued their professional development with a ""teachers for teachers"" approach both within the participating institutions and in the wider international community. Dissemination was widely spread with workshops and in conferences. MoM was awarded the EU STEM Prize at the Science on Stage Festival 2017. A teachers international Summer school took place at the end of the project with participants fom all over EU. All didactical materials, protocols, guides, lab sheets and templates are available from MoM project website as Open Education Resources (OER). A dedicated Moodle course is under construction on Scientix platform. Moreover to ensure further sustainability and durability of the project results the coordinating school offers to host EU colleagues for short job shadowing experiences (see Gateway to Education). Collaboration with new schools testing some of the materials samples has already started, envisaging the possibility of an enlarged active follow up network .Finally the project had a long lasting impact on the participating institutions as a whole, leading to development of school organization and didactics in an European dimension with an increased awareness of the existing EU initiatives in Education; better disposition towards international collaboration favouring further involvement; increased cultural awareness and multicultural acceptance; new contacts at both local, national and international level were developed that may lead to future projects or collaborations relevant also for students' career awareness."

As the pandemic unfolds across countries around the world, the normal lifestyle and educational practices face challenges. This proposal draws upon the needs emerged in secondary school education during the pandemic outbreak. Amongst many institutions secondary schools have alsoshifted their base to online platforms to conduct classes online as an alternative to ordinary face to face classes. However, the teachers in many countries were not ready for this rapid change. The project builds a strategic partnership for Digital Education Readiness in the field of STEMeducation, aiming at reinforcing the ability of school education to provide high quality, inclusive digital education in the field of STEM with the focus on building capacity to implement online, distance teaching and learning.The proposal aims at supporting secondary school teachers of STEM subjects in continuing their teaching online. In achieving this goal, an online course with 4 projects will be developed with a focus on Physics, Math, Engineering and Programming. These projects will act as exemplary projects for online education and will come together with training materials, simulations, videos, presentations. The training materials will be tailored to the thematic of each project. The participant teachers will be trained online in these projects and will be called to use the developed resources and online methods with their students.The innovative aspect of the project is that instead of simply providing ready-made resources, it smoothly reveals the methodology (pedagogical and technical) upon which these resources are designed. In other words, the teachers not only use the resources for carrying out the 4 projectsbut also explore how these resources are designed. The online course that will be designed will guide them through this process. Several tools suitable for online teaching will be selected for supporting brainstorming, online collaboration, ideation, creation and sharing. Having practically engaged the teachers in the 4 projects and released the online/distance methodology, the project goes a step further by calling the teachers to design their own projects and resources and test for students them online with students with the support of the project team. In this way, the project ensures that the knowledge gained is really put into practice.Main outputs include:-The pedagogical handbook which includes the development of the online/distance methodology: project-based learning, supporting teamwork, serving synchronous teaching (live webinars) and asynchronous online classes. -The online course that revolves around the development of 4 exemplary interdisciplinary STEM projects for secondary school education. These 4 projects come together with training materials suitable for online/distance learning incl. simulations, video, presentations and how-to instructions (that will enable teachers to look behind the development of the resources). - The development of Open Educational Resources that follows the project methodology and results in STEM projects and OERs for students for online education. It is estimated that the BEREADY learning intervention will be validated with 120 students and 40 teachers through specifically designed pilot stages. Many more students (approx. 200) and teachers (approx. 600) will be involved in the project in the context of dissemination events and workshops, multiplier events and promotional webinars.Since teachers play a fundamental role in supporting students to develop STEM skills, 21st century skills and positive attitudes towards STEM, particularly in the current situation, the communication of project results and the wider adoption of the innovative and flexible training and learning scheme can benefit school communities (apart from local) at regional, national and European level. The partnership aims at promoting networking of institutions across the EU, sharing of resources and expertise, collaboration with digital technology experts in STEM Education and finally contributing to the development of online & distance pedagogical practices based on project- based learning and costructivism/constructionism pedagogy as a response to the challenges faced during the pandemic outbreak.