The 2nd Scientix Conference took place in Brussels from Friday, 24 to Sunday 26 of October. The Conference brought together 598 participants from all over the Europe. Although most participants were STEM teachers, there was a significant number of researchers and other profiles related all of them with STEM jobs.

Plenary Session with Amber S. Gell, a NASA Rocket Scientish

All the Scientix ambassadors were invited to participate with the condition of helping the EUN staff to organise the event. They divided some of the events tasks into us and we did our best to accomplish our job. My job consisted on being  in charge of (support) the round table 2 where five specialists in Open Educational Resources (OER) debated about «Quality Standards in Educational Resources» and how to engage teachers to share their resources under non-restrictive licences.

I was on charge of supporting Round table 2 about «Quality Standards in Educational Resources»

The program of the Conference was full of keynotes in parallel sessions, workshops and round tables. In addition there was an area for stands where all the current STEM projects financed with EU funds showed their works. Another two rooms were allocated for a exhibition of posters. Plenary sessions brought us three amazing speakers: Prof. Mariano Gago, Ewald Breunesse and Amber S. Gell. They delighted us with their particular experiences in STEM topics. All the EUN staff did an excellent job designing the event.

It was really difficult to choose the the parallel sessions and workshops to attend because almost all the topics were interesting. More than once we had to run from a room in the ground floor to another in the eighth floor to arrive on time for the next session. As always, one of the best things in this kind of events is the chance of networking. Time to chat with experts, colleagues, other scientix ambassadors, people from your own country, EUN staff, etc. I met and talked to dozens of participants about different issues and it was probably the best of this kind of events in my opinion.

Me with a microphone helping in a Workshop led by Daniel Aguirre and Ascension Muñoz about «Use of Augmented Reality (AR) in Education»

Along those days I had the opportunity to meet for the first time, Miguel Angel Queiruga, the other Scientix Deputy Ambassador for Spain who had attended to different Scientix 2 kick-off event than Daniel Aguirre (The Spanish Ambassador)  and me. We all took a picture with Carlos Cunha, the Scientix Ambassador from Portugal. Part of the Iberian team of Scientix Ambassadors are in the picture below.

Iberian Ambassadors for Scientix

The number of Spaniards participants was 48. It represents a 8% of the total. We couldn’t take a picture all together but at least we took this on Friday, 24.

Galicia, my homeland, was represented by 7 participants most of us STEM teachers. Not all are in the picture below and Rafael Montero, the third from the right, came from Asturias but in spite of that he was kindly invited to join us for a picture in front of the official Scientix photo-call showing proudly our certificates of attendance 🙂

There was also time to go to the downtown in Brussels and taste some of the famous Belgian beers. As you can see in the picture Rafael Montero shows the beers that we (Ascensión Robles, Daniel Aguirre y Ramón Eijo, Rafael Montero and me) drank ‘a votre santé’ 🙂

Have a look a the storify timeline of tweets about the #ScientixConf to find more interesting moments: