Hundreds Of Students From South Florida Jewish Day Schools Show Stem Projects At "innovation Day"

BOCA RATON, Fla. - May 7, 2019 - PRLog -- A football helmet to protect against concussions; a carbon dioxide detector for the home; an alert system to avoid forgetting a child in the backseat of a car; and a basketball game mirroring the 'dance dance revolution' craze – were all featured at the Center for Initiatives in Jewish Education (CIJE) Innovation Day 2019 held at Katz Yeshiva High School (KYHS) of South Florida in Boca Raton on May 1, 2019. The Modern Orthodox coeducational yeshiva high school hosted 48 student engineering groups and hundreds of students from eight Jewish high schools across South Florida as part of the event. This was the second time in three years that KYHS hosted the CIJE Engineering Conference, which enables high school students to demonstrate their working robotic, electronic, biomedical products and prototypes in addition to their knowledge of STEM.

Visiting High Schools included: American Hebrew Academy, Donna Klein Jewish Academy, Scheck Hillel Community Day School, David Posnack Jewish Day School, Yeshiva Toras Chaim Toras Emes, Hadar High School for Girls, Sha'arei Bina Torah Academy for Girls.

The top three finishers in the innovation contest were:

• Dribble Dribble Revolution, Katz Yeshiva High School of South Florida (Boca Raton)
• EZ ID, Scheck Hillel Community School (Miami)
• BlitzBoard, Katz Yeshiva High School of South Florida (Boca Raton)

The winning project was designed by KYHS tenth grade students Akiva Kroll, Ariel Melnitsky and Yonina Kaminetzky. Akiva Kroll explains: "Innovation Day allows kids like me show off our skills in engineering and create really fun projects while experiencing the process of learning and figuring out things from scratch."

In addition to the STEM competition, new this year on the KYHS campus was a unique 47-foot Rocket Ship STEM-themed escape room where the students rescued stranded astronauts on Mars and a Vendor and College Expo featuring Edventures (drones), Magic Leap (augmented/mixed reality), The Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, and Florida Atlantic University (autonomous robotic dog).

"We are so excited to have had a record number of students come together in one place for a full day of STEM, which included challenges, vendors, colleges and the one-of-a-kind rocket ship escape room," said Dr. Yosef Wolf, Director of STEM at Katz Yeshiva High School. "We have created an environment at KYHS that builds confidence and long-term understanding while bolstering resilience, where the students gain a sense of pride and ownership in developing personalized semester-long projects. Focusing on innovation, engineering, computer science and robotics has become the priority for the evolving STEM culture at KYHS as we want our students to thrive in today's rapidly changing world."

Katz Yeshiva High School continues to be a leader in robotics and STEM, having become the first Florida Jewish Day School to ever qualify to compete in the VEX State Robotics Championship after making it to finals in a regional VEX Robotics Competition this past February. According to KYHS student Yehudah Marcus: "With every match and competition we reexaminedour design and tested new strategies. We coalesced as a team throughout the season, allowing us to develop effective solutions that resulted in us ultimatelyachieving our qualifying ranking."

CIJE is an organization that was founded in 2001 to enhance and enrich the quality of Jewish education throughout the United States. CIJE strengthens and enriches education in 221 Jewish schools in the United States across the denominational spectrum — educating a generation for innovation — and instilling critical thinking, creativity and problem-solving skills.

About Katz Yeshiva High School of South Florida
Katz Yeshiva High School of South Florida (KYHS), formerly Weinbaum Yeshiva High School (WYHS), is a Modern Orthodox coeducational yeshiva high school. It offers a demanding dual curriculum of General and Judaic Studies. The school was founded in 1998 and its mission is to engage, challenge, and inspire students to reach their intellectual, personal, and spiritual potential in an environment that stimulates critical thinking and academic and religious growth. Today's KYHS student body (grades 9-12) includes approximately 350 students from Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach Counties. KYHS is the largest Orthodox High School outside the New York area. KYHS welcomes families of all backgrounds who share its goals of academic and spiritual growth for their children. Students are expected to respect kashrut, Shabbat, and appropriate interactions between young men and women both in and out of school. KYHS families are Shomer Shabbat (Sabbath observant) and do not write, drive, or use electronics for the 25-hour period of the weekly Jewish Sabbath from sundown on Friday until nightfall on Saturday. KYHS' secular studies curriculum offers a wide range of required and elective offerings ranging in levels from Basic to AP studies. Learn more about KYHS at www.yeshivahs.org.