STEAM Explorers Programme for Group Mobility Organized in Foligno, Italy

Eight students with their accompanying teacher from AIC participated in an Erasmus+ group activity in Nocera Umbra, Italy hosted by Istituto Omnicomprensivo Dante Alighieri. The group gathered early Sunday morning in Budapest airport before taking off to Italy’s Roma Ciampino airport. After landing, the group had lunch in the airport before riding a Flixbus heading to Foligno where two representatives of the hosting organization were waiting for our arrival, Luisa and Alessio. The group enjoyed the picturesque scenes of Umbria mountainous regions during the bus drive which took a little more than two hours.

Upon arrival in Foligno, the representatives guided us to their cars and drove us to our hostel,a monastery called Domus Ecclesiae in Nocera Umbra. At the hostel, we were assigned our rooms and time to unpack and relax a little until a nice dinner was served at the same location. The following day, on Monday, we were escorted to a high school called Instituto Omnicomprensivo Dante Alighieri where some students presented their projects including Photo-irrigation which revolved around water and plants, and also some studies about specific plants in the region. Another group focused more on physics and photovoltaic based projects.

Then, our group was given the chance to present their school, so Jani and Juli played a video of AIC which was prepared for marketing purposes. This was followed by a break after which Bianca presented the agenda and the concepts for the whole week including a digital platform called “miro” on which groups were divided according to their interests. Hence, mixed groups were created including Italian and Hungarian students. They had a task to build the highest structure using spaghetti sticks with marshmallows together, so students worked in the open air together to accomplish this task, after which each group showed their results and discussed the difficulties in their chosen shape. After having lunch in the school, Maurizio, the deputy headmaster, gave a tour of the school to our students.

In the afternoon, the group had a tour to a nearby town called Foligno visiting a Museo della Quintana which showed the history of the town and visiting some main highlights of it ending with a dinner at Botanico restaurant. The next day, on Thursday, we had a great forest trip in the Woods of Piegaro in Perugia province where we had a professional guide by a professor of forestry explaining everything to us during our hike in the woods. We also saw how data is collected from trees using specific appliances attached to trees. After this hike, we drove till the border between Umbria and Tuscany where we visited Vivai Margheriti and saw a huge diversity of plant types. On Friday, we went to Palazzo Camilli to finalize everyone’s projects to prepare for their demonstrations in the afternoon in front of the mayor of Nocera Umbra in a science fair type of an event which was done in Domus hostel. On Saturday, the group went to Assisi in the morning and had a nice sightseeing and after having our lunch, we took a train to Perugia where the mini-metro was the main highlight. In the evening, we returned back to Assisi preparing for our flight back to Budapest on the next day.

This mobility was funded by The European Commision.

The afternoon included a little tour in Nocera Umbra and climbing the tower which lets you see all the beautiful scenery of the surrounding places. The next day, on Tuesday, were gathered in Palazzo Camilli where each group was introduced to their mentor to start with their specific project whether it is to build a smart bus station for the town, to design a greenhouse or other projects related to IT and robotics. On Wednesday, the program included activities dealing with design and architecture where students had to build some structure with some wood pieces and tie them together.

Article by: Harout Parseghian