[socios-spr] Call for Participation - Workshop on Educational Robotics (WEROB) 2016

[Nuno Lau]

Dear all,

Workshop on Educational Robotics (WEROB) is held during RoboCup Symposium every year. It aims to bring together teachers, mentors, and students from schools,
 clubs, community centers, and educational institutions offering formal and informal educational robotics learning opportunities to students, to showcase and discuss their experiences, accomplishments, and current practices using robotics. We are looking for
 presentation proposals from teams, team mentors, robotics educators. Please share the call details below with teams and robotics educators from your region!


                 *** WEROB ***   
         Workshop on Educational Robotics

(an event co-located with the RoboCup Symposium 2016)

               Leipzig, Germany
           http://www.robocup2016.org/

                 July 4th, 2016

The use of robotics for educational purposes has been pursued for a long time and has become more and more popular every year. Several factors have contributed to such situation, including the availability of developmentally
 appropriate and less expensive robotics kits and individual components, as well as the proliferation of robotics competitions for the pre-university levels. As a consequence, robotics started to be incorporated into classroom lessons and has become a educational
 tool for teaching concepts in a broad range of areas, from electricity and mechanics to programming, mathematics, physics, etc. 

In this workshop, we aim at bringing together teachers, mentors, and students from schools, clubs, community centers, and educational institutions offering formal and informal educational robotics learning opportunities, to
 discuss their experiences and current practices using robotics. This workshop hopes to also provide a place to share relevant projects and discuss specific technical issues that may arise in different learning setting as well as the impact of robotics in education.

Some examples of topics of particular interest to this workshop are:

- impact of educational robotics on student learning
- impact of educational robotics in the community
- school projects involving robotics
- specific use of robots to demonstrate STEM concepts
- techniques to build robots
- innovative use of sensors or new technology
- showcase of students (teams) accomplishment with robotics, especially with RoboCupJunior leagues

Types of presentations are:
- mentor/teacher presentation of their research and/or practice (20-30 min)
- students/team presentation of their accomplishment (showcase, 20-30 min)
- hands-on workshop to introduce or teach new robotics ideas/tools (1-2 hrs)

For information about past presentations/papers, visit:
http://rcj.robocup.org/resources.html

Important dates:
- submissions deadline: June 10, 2016
- notification of acceptance: June 15, 2016
- submission of final version: June 26, 2016

Submissions:
Please, write a brief text explaining your presentation. It can be from a single page to maximum of 6 pages. All submitted papers must be written in English, in single column and following the template that you can find under
 "Author Guidelines" in 
http://www.springer.com/series/1244. Final submission should be minimum 3 pages and maximum 6 pages. We will post all accepted papers and their presentations on the RoboCupJunior website under the resources page.

Once your paper is ready to be submitted, please, send it by email directly to the workshop organizers (Amy Eguchi - amy_eguchi  bloomfield.edu and A. Fernando Ribeiro - fernando  dei.uminho.pt).
 
If you have registered for RoboCupJunior, you will have an access to the RoboCup Symposium and to this workshop. If you wish to present at the workshop but are not registered for RoboCupJunior or RoboCup, you need to register
 for the RoboCup Symposium, which will also grant an access to the co-located events such as this workshop. 

The workshop organizers:
Amy Eguchi - Bloomfield College, New Jersey, USA - amy_eguchi  bloomfield.edu
A. Fernando Ribeiro, Universidade do Minho, Portugal - fernando  dei.uminho.pt