Our mission:
The mission of CRESTEM Association is the creation, development and promotion of an educational ecosystem capable of providing children and students with a complete, balanced and quality education that enables them to make informed decisions that will impact the world and how they will live.

What we do:
Since it's creation, CRESTEM Association is focused on making high quality STEM/STEAM educational programs available to the Romanian students.

We believe that kids need full time guidance and continuity in the education they are receiving, so we are interested in projects with medium to long term impact. While we do get involved in awareness campaigns for coding and robotics like EU CODE WEEK, EU ROBOTICS WEEK, HOUR OF CODE, our main focus is with programs what offer a more complete, hands-on STEM/STEAM interaction and education.

Currently, our main projects are FIRST LEGO League and FIRST LEGO League Junior. FIRST LEGO League Challenge and FIRST LEGO League Explore were created by FIRST (Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) and LEGO Education. We are the operational partner for these two programs in Romania.

Since 2016, the community surrounding these two programs is growing in Romania from 23 teams in 2016 to over 125 teams in 2019. With the help of the teachers, parents and our amazing volunteers these programs are able to exist and reach so many kids.
In order to get even more kids interested in STEM/STEAM we are looking for ways to:
- create new robotics clubs in schools
- offer scholarships to the most active teachers and students
- lower the entrance requirements into these two programs (grants for teams)
- organize regional tournaments (lower transportation and accommodation requirements for the teams)
- help teams participate at international events
- get more volunteers involved
- get the local volunteers to participate at the international events (best training possible)

Besides the above projects, we are actively supporting other STEM competitions which are organized in partnership with University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest in case of RobotOlympics (2016, 2017 editions), local FIRST LEGO League teams in case of LEGO SUMO 2018 in Pitesti and have STEM campaings like EU CODE WEEK and HOUR OF CODE.

We are also involved with regional STEM communities (Magurele Summer Schools, Magurele Educational Center) and actively participating in local conferences, expos and exhibitions.

Become our partner:
We are looking for partners which share our passion for education and believe that by empowering the kids of today we can grow the change makers of tomorrow.

TOGHETHER, we RISE!