Professional organizations and people ( Private Institute STEM Education Cyprus LTD, Novatex Solutions, Universiteit Gent) who are interested and experienced in education to children, robotics, and stem education, robotics competitions, educational studies developmental and behavioral psychology, etc. came together in an effort to provide training material to educators, study and familiarize themselves with, allowing them to teach STEAM subjects in classrooms that have children with ASD in a more efficient and inclusive manner. This will help the educators but eventually will also help the children with ASD witness the power of STEAM and how they can focus their skills in these subjects.
Private Institute STEM Education Cyprus LTD was created with the aim of promoting STEM (and also STEAM) education to children in Cyprus. The institute provides courses for children from primary to secondary education using state of the art STEM approaches. Dr. Pericles Cheng, the director of the institute, has a long history of academic research and more than 18 years of teaching experience at the university level. He has been teaching Computer Science since 2003 and began working with robotics more than a decade ago. In 2014, he received a Google 4 Schools grant and through that, he began teaching educators all over Cyprus in the use of robotics in the classroom. In 2017 he received his doctorate in educational robotics and in 2018 he became the only LEGO Certified Teacher Trainer in Cyprus. He published research papers on educational robotics and wrote a book chapter on the use of robotics with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. He has participated in numerous national and European projects.