CIJE-TECH program invigorates local high schools

HAFTR hosted 300 students from 19 tri-state area Jewish high schools to showcase what they learned during two years of an Israeli high tech engineering course.

The Center for Initiatives in Jewish Education (CIJE) Tech High School Engineering Program and Young Engineers Conference “is one of the most exciting curricular initiatives we have done in years,” said Rabbi M. Shepard, principal of Torah Academy for Girls High School in Far Rockaway. “The students are engaged, involved and thinking, which is as much as you can ask for in any course.”

Area high schools at the May 21 conference included HALB’s DRS and SKA, HANC, Bnos Bais Yaakov, TAG, Manhattan High School for Girls, Yeshivah of Flatbush and MTA, as well as HAFTR.

The program features a two-year introduction to physics and biomedical engineering for ninth and tenth graders, with the goal of facilitating creative, analytical and independent thinking across disciplines while fostering leadership skills and the ability to work in a group. To achieve this, CIJE trains and mentors teachers and provides the necessary materials for the course and its labs.

Adam Jerozolim, an engineering specialist with CIJE, said the program “is based off a company called Israel Sci-Tech who developed curriculums for a series of STEM schools in Israel called ORT schools. The goal is to open our students to STEM fields and to give them tools for thinking and discovery that are not currently utilized in the U.S. education system.” Jerozolim said that STEM — Science, Technology, Engineering and Math — education is now “the ‘hot’ topic in education and CIJE is giving yeshivas the leg up. We are way ahead of the game in terms of integrating STEM, robotics, programming, engineering, etc. into the high school classroom.”

Even yeshivas that seek to limit students’ exposure to the Internet and related technology have brought this into their schools. “We are bringing in a new way of thinking and learning, and their students love it,” said Jerozolim. “The goal is not to get students to become engineers, it’s to get them to become thinkers and problem solvers.”

CIJE was founded in 2001 to “enhance and enrich” Jewish education in the U.S., according to its website.