Hadar Bet Yaakov’s STEM team won their third consecutive medal in this year’s ORT STEM Contest. This year, they proudly won first place under the tutelage of STEM teacher Ms. Michelle Weingarten and ORT STEM program director Ms. Irit Tzemah. For the contest, HBY’s two STEM teams presented functional business websites for different commercial ventures they created. One team designed a camp website while the other constructed a website selling tickets to a school production. Both sites utilized navigation bars, hyper-links, drop-down menus, images, and created interactive pages so customers could make purchases or fill out applications. Teams were able to integrate both coding language and website design skills to construct a professional website for commercial use.
Three years ago, when the school began, Hadar instituted the ORT STEM program as a cutting-edge computer engineering curriculum for all grades. Skills are scaffolded as students start with taking apart a computer to discover the motherboard, CPU, HD, and RAM, and then progress to coding, creating moving images, Excel, Web design, and robotics. Science is integrated with chemistry lessons on molecular structure, followed by student-generated, animated molecules showing atom-electron relationships.
HBY students have ended each year by creating a website utilizing all their computer skills in conjunction with math and Judaic skills, as well. The first year, girls invented their very own “Mishkan Website” that explained and illustrated every part of the Mishkan, and the second-year websites focused on Jewish holidays. Their site showed everything anyone ever needed to know about Pesach: from Biblical significance to Jewish law and even to family food and entertainment costs associated with the holiday, replete with an Excel chart as a bookkeeping log.
Hadar Bet Yaakov girls are excited about the variety of STEM possibilities that await them post high school. They are on-track to succeed in competitive undergraduate and graduate programs due to the immersive learning incorporated in ORT’s STEM curriculum under the leadership of Dr. David Kanani. ORT is devoted to facilitating Jewish youth in the achievement of academic excellence and career readiness, and Hadar is proud to have its students on track with all programming that leads to personal and academic achievement and success.
By Shoshanna Friedman
