The Yeshivat Frisch engineering team won first place out of 16 high schools at the CIJE Hackathon last week! For this year’s challenge, students were introduced to Innovation Africa, a nonprofit organization that brings Israeli solar, water and agricultural technologies to rural African villages. Students learned about how Innovation Africa builds wells for clean water using Israeli technology and solar panels, connecting STEM to Israel and tikkun olam. For the Hackathon, high school engineering teams were challenged to create an IoT device that assists the lives of the people living in poverty-stricken, remote villages in Africa. Each team was required to build and present a mini “final project,” capable of being monitored and controlled remotely via a website using a Node Mcu microcontroller. Teams had to design, build, code, assemble, pitch and demo their prototype. The day included crash courses in HTML, web design and IOT.

Frisch teams built two working prototypes:

WaterWagon: a solar powered vehicle that collects and transports water from the underground source to villages faster and more efficiently; and EmergencyEcho: a bracelet with button inputs and GPS that sends an alert when the wearer is in danger.

Great job to team members Abie Stelzer, Alex Seligman, Alon Stein, Eliezer Dimbert, Ephraim Fisher, Henry Yellin, Hunter London, Josh Davis, Kovi Ressler, Natan Dov Segal, Nili Bickel and Rebecca Haberman!