On Tuesday, May 23, the eleventh grade Shevach High School STEM class and their instructor Mrs. Paula Berger, participated in the CIJE Innovation Day at the American Dream Mall. The STEM students joined over a thousand other students from 47 different schools, bringing together 450 projects to compete in the engineering competition.
The engineering competition is a capstone project. The objective of the capstone project is to identify a problem and design and engineer an innovative solution to the problem or improve upon an existing solution. This requires the building of a physical device (the solution to the problem) that includes embedded programming (coding) and electronics.
Two Shevach teams won top awards for their projects. Yael Goldfarb, Devora Lind, and Devorah Loiterman won first place overall in Engineering for Personal Care, and Shayna Hoch, Tehila Levant, and Yael Zimmerman won third place overall for Environmental Engineering. The Engineering for Personal Care project was a teddy bear that, when used, can aid in better sleep. The bear had red lights, a fan, a diffuser for lavender scent, and played calming music. The Environmental Engineering project was developed in order to detect lead in pipes. They placed a sensor in the pipes that detected changes in ion concentration and notified the owner of the pipes that there was lead, with an alarm and an LCD screen that stated that lead was detected.
In addition to the above, Shevach students designed and presented the following projects: an alarm to detect if the temperature of the lithium ion batteries is getting too hot and might start a fire, a machine to detect and alert the user of plaque on teeth, a shower mat that changes water pressure when the user is not directly under the water, an adaptation to a car to turn on the blinker when your GPS says to turn, and an alarm to detect leaky pipes, in order to prevent property damage and excessively high water bills.
In the words of Daniella Natanov, “Innovation Day was a unique experience and it taught us a lot about different approaches to science and engineering.” Tehilla Levant shared, “I really liked working with different girls. It helped build teamwork skills and being able to compromise.” Zahava Yusupov relayed that working on her project “was an opportunity for me to learn how to code, create a circuit, and speak in public.” Meira Moskowitz highlighted that “it was so interesting to see what other groups came up with.
The pitch rooms worked very nicely, and it wasn’t as stressful as I thought it would be. Everyone was so excited to be there.” Yael Zimmerman added, “We were given all the help we needed. Innovation Day was an amazing experience and I loved seeing all the schools come together.” Naama Rambod truly enjoyed being “part of an initiative that is able to create such helpful and unique designs to help society progress.”
Congratulations to all of the participants for their exceptional work!
