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Finals and Regents exams are always a chance for students to demonstrate what they have learned over the course of the year, but Wednesday evening was the first of its kind at Central: a siyum to collectively celebrate all the Torah learned in the building over the course of the year, without any connection to grades or evaluation.

On Sunday, May 19, Shevach High School’s STEM class presented their engineering projects at CIJE Innovation Day. This exciting interschool competition at Bell Works in New Jersey included over 1400 students from 45 different Jewish schools from across the United States. After setting up their projects, students met with the judges and explained the technology and processes that they used to build their products.

The students at the Yeshiva of Central Queens have been focusing on STEAM learning. First and Second Graders are working on the idea of engineering and the process of coming up with an idea for something that can help make our lives easier, creating a design of that idea, building it, and testing it – even if they have to do it over and over until they get it right. Working as engineers, students learned about space exploration, including the planets in order from the sun, and how astronauts and other engineers design and build things like rovers to help explore the universe to where humans cannot always go. Following a discussion about exploring Mars, they built their own Mars-rovers using their knowledge of science, technology, and math, and combining it with their creative, artistic side.

The Bais Yaakov Academy of Queens’ eighth graders were introduced to the basics of computer coding when they began learning programming language, an educational language based on Java. Initially, students were skeptical of their abilities to write meaningful code, but by the end of the first lesson, most of them had picked up enough of the computer language and syntax to produce color and shapes.

Yeshiva Har Torah’s seventh graders brought home some hardware from the Inter-Yeshiva Science Congress, as in years past.

Earlier this year, YHT’s seventh graders put on an amazing science fair for guests and judges. The judges selected five projects from the fair to send to the Inter-Yeshiva Science Congress, hosted by HALB and attended by teams from Bais Yaakov Academy, Bnos Malka, HAFTR, HALB, Moriah, Ramaz, Shulamith, YCQ, YHT, and YOSS.

Each year, HANC seniors are given the opportunity to choose between a professional internship and a week of dynamic seminars to culminate their high school experience. This year, we had a record number of seniors participating in exciting internships. Seniors who opted for seminars heard from dynamic presenters who led interactive workshops on various important topics.