Yeshivat Frisch’s annual Science & Engineering Symposium, dedicated by the Maurice and Hester Lowenthal Foundation in memory of Mitzi and Edward Traurig z”l, took place this Monday, highlighting the skill, creativity and hard work of the hundreds of students taking part in Frisch’s engineering courses and co-curricular programming.

The evening opened with a keynote address by Daniel Bendavid, a Frisch alumnus who shared his journey as former electrical/control systems engineer and current software engineer at Thirty Madison, a digital health company that specializes in treatments for migraines, seasonal allergies and other medical conditions.

Following Bendavid’s address, students had the opportunity to present their projects to their families, friends and community members. Freshmen and sophomores in Frisch’s Engineering Track presented their capstone projects, which ranged from lifesaving to lightheartedly pragmatic. For example, “THE FEW” Fire Evacuation Window (by Sam Heller, Nili Bickel, Eliana Weinstein and Hunter London) is a home system that automatically opens a window when carbon monoxide is detected, while “Hotscoops” heated spoon (by Avi Sebrow, Gavriel Teigman and Jared Zimbalist) is designed for scooping ice cream with ease. Each capstone project’s picture, description and team was also featured on the Engineering Symposium 2022 website.

Juniors and seniors showcased projects undertaken as part of their advanced Engineering elective courses. This year, electives included Aerial Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Tikkun Olam Makers. Simultaneously, symposium attendees seeking sports-style entertainment were able to view a robotics competition by Frisch’s robotics team, the CouGears.

Girls Who Code, an after-school coding club with 40 members, was also represented at the symposium; This year, students learned how to code a snake game using Python Turtle. In addition, Monday’s event featured a new genre of coding projects. This year, Frisch embarked on a new initiative: implementing a new Python coding curriculum for all incoming ninth graders. Over the course of the year, students had the opportunity to choose their own projects to work on, with faculty guidance. A number of the freshman coding projects were featured at the symposium, including a zman calculator, a recipe generator and a new Wordle game.

Thanks to Frisch Engineering Program Director Rifkie Silverman and Engineering faculty members Travis Merritt and Michael Preston for their invaluable instruction. Frisch’s student engineers look forward to participating in next week’s CIJE Innovation Day!