(Courtesy of CIJE) Hundreds of students, teachers and parents from across the United States convened online, on the evening of May 26, to recognize and celebrate the ingenuity, research and perseverance on the part of close to 1,000 young innovators representing Jewish day schools across America. The Center for Initiatives in Jewish Education (CIJE) families tuned in for an amazing lineup of student project highlights, live STEM related quiz shows, the culmination of the Middle School Extreme Challenge and the long-awaited announcement of the CIJE Innovation Day champions. The annual CIJE Innovation Day provides an exciting time for students to present the capstone projects which they created, designed and engineered in the areas of innovation in: the arts, assistive technology, commercial consumer products, Environment and sustainability, healthcare, personal consumer products, schooling, and advancements in hardware prototyping.
This year’s shift to virtual learning catalyzed students to represent their work through the use of digital tools to create a logo, webpage and video pitch. In a time that will change ways of learning for generations, teachers and students worked remotely alongside the CIJE team of experts to delve into the design thinking process, utilize the resources at hand and create an innovative and resourceful project. The teamwork skills and support that were modeled for the students throughout the process will surely have a lasting impact on the way in which they will approach problem solving in the future. In order to facilitate the online representation of the students’ work, the CIJE curated offerings available throughout the day for five weeks prior to the event, to cover new topics such as digital design and branding, hardware simulation software, physical prototyping and three hours daily of online office hours with an engineer, a CIJE Mentor. In addition, this year brought about a new judging rubric based on design thinking and the facilitation of peer-review.
Student ingenuity was at its peak with projects such as the PRODUCT[tive] Retail Rack developed by Bruriah students which won best Commercial Consumer Product. The student webpage describes their innovation as a “clothing rack that tracks consumer interest and catalogs it for retailers and designers, thereby streamlining inventory purchasing and movement. The Retail Rack monitors how many times a design is picked up off the rack via a contact sensor on the hanger and on the rack. It then sends this information to the store’s database using a WiFi chip.”
Students from the Berman Hebrew Academy (MD) won recognition for their website, BuildingBelief.org, that allows Jewish teenagers on a spiritual journey to deepen their faith by reading and sharing stories of inspiration, motivation, and spirituality from other inspired teenagers. Frisch students used the current pandemic as a source of motivation in creating a winning innovation in the personal consumer product category, the Clean Machine. The device is an automatic soap dispenser with a built-in countdown, guiding the user to wash their hands for the necessary 20 seconds. The countdown is displayed through an LED strip placed under the soap to make it glow.
See the gallery of student innovation from this year’s capstone projects, www.thecije.org/innovation2020. It is certain to leave you feeling reassured that the future is looking bright and that our CIJE students are busy innovating towards the future.
