FINALIST YEHOSHUA JASSE WITH THE LIBRA-SCAN INVENTION THAT HE CREATED TOGETHER WITH FELLOW YESHIVA DARCHEI TORAH STUDENTS SHMUEL ELIYAHU EIDELMAN AND SHAYA TRENK .
Darchei Team Shines at Prestigious STEM Competition
BY BARBARA BENSOUSSAN
Competition at the annual CIJE Tank competition is fierce , but the students representing Yeshiva Darchei Torah rose to the challenge ! CIJE , the Center for Initiatives in Jewish Education , promotes educational enrichment in Jewish day schools , particularly in STEM ( Science , Technology , Engineering , and Mathematics ) fields . The CIJE Tank challenges high school students to create new products and present them to a panel of investors . Over 400 projects are submitted to the competition , of which only four are selected for the final presentations . The winners walk away with a provisional patent application worth $ 2,000 and valuable advice about how to develop their products for the market . All finalists receive gifts such as trophies , headsets , and speakers .
Usually held in person , the CIJE Tank finals were held via Zoom this past January , after the judges evaluated projects submitted the previous year . Yeshiva Darchei Torah was honored to have one of its teams selected for the finals . Students Shmuel Eliyahu Eidelman , Shaya Trenk , and Yehoshua Jasse created a video to present their product , a hand-held scanning system named Libra- Scan that detects misplaced library books .
Most of us have had the experience of going to find a book on a shelf , only to find that it is not there . Shaya Trenk , who helps run the middle school library of Yeshiva Darchei Torah , was all too familiar with this problem . “ Over six million books are misplaced every year , according to the American Library Association ,” he says . He and his brother came up with the idea of producing a device that could scan library books and determine if they
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