The kickoff meeting of the ERASMUS+ project FeSTEM (Female Empowerment in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics in Higher Education) took place with great success on January 30-31, at the Cyprus University of Technology. FeSTEM, which is funded by the European Commission, is composed of five partners in five countries (Cyprus, Italy, Greece, Spain, Slovenia). Cyprus is represented by the Social Computing Research Centre  (http://www.socialcomputing.eu)  which has the responsibility for coordinating the project, with Dr. Antigoni Parmaxi as the Scientific Coordinator of the Project. The FeSTEM project includes leading universities and research centres with a distinguished research activity in the fields of science and education: the Smart Mobile Interactive Learning Environments (SMILE, http://smile.uom.gr/) Laboratory of the University of Macedonia, the CESIE Research Center (https://cesie.org/en/), the Geoss Educational Organization (www.ic-geoss.si) and two industrial partners: Magenta Consultoria (www.magentaconsultoria.com) and ARIS (http: //www.ariscy.com/).

The main objective of the FeSTEM project is to promote an innovative pedagogical approach that will enable Higher Education students to use traditional and computationally rich tools to create common exhibits that will serve as mentoring models to encourage girls and women to remain active in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). 

During the kick-off meeting, a sequence of different presentations took place in relation to the philosophy and the goals of the project. In addition, the partners had the opportunity to exchange their views, focusing on the priorities of the FeSTEM project. 

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