The DiSTARS International Symposium was a five-day long event taking place in Greece in July 2-7, 2023.
It involved more than 50 teachers, researchers, pedagogical experts, stakeholder from creative industry and policy makers from the project participating countries and beyond.
The purpose of the symposium was to present the:
– DiSTARS project and its pedagogical approach
– DiSTARS updated storytelling platform and Tool-kit
– DiSTARS new resources and evaluation results
– DiSTARS Best Practices
– DiSTARS teacher training course (and evaluation from the participation of 157 Greek teachers)
-Future plans of DiSTARS to the wider research, education, outreach, arts and policy community.
The conference program can be found here.
The event took place at Golden Cast Hotel, in Marathon Greece, in collaboration with the European School Innovation Academy that was hosting many summer school academies with more than 150 teachers that specific week. Besides the presentations the consortium set up a VR corner at the main auditorium and demonstrated the DiSTARS platform and its features at a daily basis to teachers that were interested in having a VR experience through students DiSTARS digital stories.
Moreover, a special session was presented where participants had the opportunity to virtually visit the AOUDA Spacesuit Lab in Innsbruck. The live online tour was given by the Director of OeWF Dr. Gernot Groemer followed by a Q&A sessions with the conference participants.
The DiSTARS conference was disseminated and all member particiating in ESIA’s summer schools received a hard-copy of the DiSTARS conference program and information about the DiSTARS VR Corner (where three laptops equipped with Oculus VR were set) where they could experience virtual reality through the DiSTARS environment. In this framework, the project consortium raised awareness and engaged the associated stakeholders in a productive dialogue aiming to adopt and expand and enrich the DiSTARS approach beyond the termination of the project. As new activities have been planned for the 2023-24 school year, participants had the opportunity to be informed about them and express their interest through registering on our website.
