As the final weeks of school go by, all aspects of Schechter education are concluding as we celebrate all the hard work put in this year. Today, the high school engineering students traveled to New Jersey’s American Dream Mall to participate in Innovation Day run by the Center for Initiatives in Jewish Education (CIJE). At this science fair-style event, students from Jewish day schools across the country presented the engineering projects that they have been working on all year in hopes of winning an award.
The day was a success, with many students winning awards. (Schechter Instagram)
Penina Charry, a freshman who went to her very first Innovation Day today, explained that her project “is a vest that alerts people with visual or auditory impairments to cross the street safely. We taught AI what different vehicles look like and uploaded the data to our app. We also have a circuit that makes our app more precise, using an ultrasound distance sensor to detect obstacles in the way. The user will know they shouldn’t cross the street when they feel a vibration or hear a noise.”
Sophomore Shir Levenson shared all the aspects of work that go into making the projects. She said, “We've been preparing for Innovation Day throughout this whole school year by working on our project--working on the code, the design, the circuit, the website, and really all of the components that go into what our presentation is going to be, and then working with other teammates to practice presenting and get feedback on what we can make better and what we can do. Our preparations are really preparing our project and how we're going to present.”
Levenson later shared that her favorite part "of Innovation Day was presenting my project because it was something that we had been working on the whole year, and I knew that our slide show was good, and I knew that our presentation was good, so I was excited to present it for the judges to show that our project worked." She continued, "It's really a great time for the community to come together, especially in this time of war and struggle, because we can come together with all different schools and all different denominations and cultures, and really just show that a part of education is that we all bond together because of engineering and the hard work that we did.”
Yael Pedram, a junior who went through all of the CIJE programming, went back to Innovation Day to judge the competition. She explained that one of the favorite projects she saw was one that utilized high-frequency sounds for army identification. The high-frequency sound machine would be placed in the helmets of soliders so they could be identified. Pedram said, “This is a response to what happened on October 7, when Hamas pretended to be IDF soldiers.”
Throughout this day of Jewish engineering and technology, there are many emotions going through the minds of Schechter students. Charry shared, “I was stressed and excited at the same time. I knew I worked hard on my project, and I gave it my all. Since this is my first Innovation Day, I didn’t really know what to expect, but I was really happy to be there. It was exciting to see what other people thought about my project and to see other people’s projects.”
Luckily, all her hard work paid off because she and her partner, Yoni Pedram, won third place for assistive technology. Charry said, “That is by far the best part of my day!”
Hannah Fineman is a writer for Paw Print Now and has been published on the site since November 2021. Hannah is currently a junior at the Schechter School of Long Island and can be reached at the following email address: hfineman25@schechterli.org
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