RamTEC Newsletter: Fall 2021

Ramaz Technology, Engineering, and Coding: The Department of the Future

A Word From our TEC Faculty We began our robust TEC program in the 2018-2019 school year. Our first year, students eagerly acclimated to an entire new course in grades nine, ten and eleven, and many of our students even competed with other jewish day schools at the end of the year.

The 2019-2020 school year started off great!

In January, ten of our students participated in a CIJE-Tech hackathon at Yeshiva University. Of the eighteen participating schools, one of the Ramaz groups came in second place with their invention of the Hydrosoil - a pump that measures soil’s moisture and pumps water into it when necessary.

In early March, two of our students participated in a CIJE Innovators Trip to Boston for Young Women. Sydney E. and Finley H. spent three full days with about 30 students from other Jewish day schools. It was a fun-filled and educational trip. Highlights of the trip included visiting the MIT museum and Media Lab, meeting with the MIT student auto team, visiting the Harvard engineering school where they toured the school and labs, visiting the Broad Institute, and hearing from speakers about ocean robotics at the MIT Sea Grant.

In the 2020-2021 school year, our TEC classes met less frequently but as you will see in the pages ahead written by our students, we had a very productive year: Our ninth graders successfully mastered the use of the arduino microcontroller.

Our tenth graders spent the first half of the year continuing to learn more functions of the arduino and focused the second half working on group projects which culminated in our own sophomore TEC fair in June. Our juniors all learned coding in Python and made their own programs for each semester project. The coding club continued to meet and work on the Ramaz Life App throughout the year on zoom.

We are very proud of the outstanding work our students have produced. In this coming year, in addition to continuing to enhance our current curriculum for all four grades, we are implementing a new sophomore Web Design course as an alternative to the second year CIJE Engineering course and are starting a Robotics team and competing in the CIJE Robotics League for the first time. We are so excited about these new endeavors and are looking forward to a successful year for our students! We hope you enjoy reading what our students’ have been working on.

Lenore Brachot Fabio Nironi Ethan Rotenberg Ethan Fuld

Tenth Grade TEC Fair Our sophomores devoted the second semester to working on group projects.

They learned about the design process, brainstormed and came up with a problem they wanted to solve, designed a solution, and built their project. Throughout the process, they also learned about teamwork, budgeting, and presentation skills, while advancing their TEC skills.

students the limitless opportunities that await them when given the advantage of learning coding and engineering principles in high school.

After being inspired by David’s words, students and faculty circulated the auditorium and heard presentations from each group about their project. The projects were very impressive considering the very limited meeting time.

On June 3rd, the entire sophomore grade participated in a TEC fair where they presented these projects. The event began with hearing from David Dellal ‘13. When David was a student at Ramaz, he pioneered the engineering club. After graduating he earned a BS in mechanical engineering from MIT and is an NSF graduate fellow at Yale earning his PhD in biomedical engineering.

He is listed in Forbes 30 under 30 for his start up “Floe”, of which he is the founder and CEO. David is also a Managing Partner at the Dorm Room Fund, the largest student-run venture capital firm in the US that invests in student-founded technology startups. He spoke to our students about his path after high school and then shared a few innovative projects to demonstrate to our

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The following are two sample abstracts of our students’ projects. The first is a small portable air conditioner and the second is a UV surface disinfector.

“UV SURFACE DISINFECTOR “The S.P.A.C or the Smart Portable

Air Conditioner is a system that uses an Arduino to create an AC that adjusts the fan speed based on the temperature, and it can be brought around with you anywhere! When it gets hotter the fan spins faster, and when it gets colder, the fan slows down, allowing for an AC that does not need to be manually adjusted.

Also, you can see the temperature change and the rate the fan is spinning change through the serial monitor. The components in our system include a thermocouple, an H-bridge, an Arduino, two fans, and a battery (along with some wires and a breadboard as well). Our system is fully functional, and we managed to get it to work as we intended, if not better.

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-By: Josh Chetrit, David Rabiei, Daniel Kalimi, Jonathan Licht, and Ilan Puterman

What is a UV disinfecting robot?

Because of Covid-19, people have had to take extra precautions to stay germ free and healthy. That is where our Arduino-based UV disinfector comes in! Using UV lights and a motor, we began constructing a robot that is able to sanitize surfaces and keep spaces clean and germ-free.

How did we construct our robot? We chose to go along the route of using ultrasonic sensors, as they have more benefits to our project than the usual obstacle avoidance sensors.

Our robot uses 3 HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensors. Along with that, we used hardware such as the Arduino promini, UV LEDs, an L293D motor driver, and a few resistors.

Our code was pretty long; we were able to use many skills that we learned this year paired with code we found after researching our project, and we presented our final version of the code at the TEC fair.

” -By: Alex Paul, Mikaila Bodner, and Tova Solomons

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RamTEC CLUBS Coding Club

By Sarah Silverman ‘24 This past year was challenging. That’s a bit of an understatement, but it was especially true for the many clubs at Ramaz. “Inperson” interaction was basically null and void, and many after-school activities had to be dramatically changed. One exception to that rule was the coding club. In 2020, before the pandemic, this club was a place for students to come together to work on Ramlife, the Ramaz schedule app developed

by Levi Lesches ‘21. The club consisted of computers, teamwork, and skill for coding.

The great thing about this type of club is that it was easy to transition to a virtual platform.

Zoom allows for easy communication and the ability to share links to software and code. In addition to working on the app and projects from the previous year, the club, run

by Isaac Silverman ‘21 and Levi Lesches’ 21 with faculty advisor Mr. Vovsha, decided to add new and fun initiatives to educate and inspire the next generation of coders. One of these new initiatives was a weekly “coding challenge.” At every club meeting, before working on developing and fixing the app, Mr. Vovsha introduced a fun and interactive

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software challenge. It took many forms; a great example would be when we used the terminal on macOS to send emails.

We did not need to rely on outlook or any third-party outlet; we were able to write, address and send any given amount of emails just from code. This type of activity enabled members of the club to feel like software engineers, creating and coding their own projects. In addition to weekly meetings every Wednesday, Mr. Vovsha made sure to provide extra information and educational opportunities to grow and expand our knowledge of coding.

Indeed, you can’t learn an entire software program through a one-week session, but using them as a resource with additional educational websites and information available, you can grow your skills. The coding club provides a helpful environment for working on personal projects, the app, or just learning coding in general.

As a freshman last year and a new member of the Ramaz community, this club helped me branch out to meet students in other grades and learn skills that I would not normally gain in my regular classes. Coding is a group effort--a collection of ideas and processes best transcribed through group collaboration.

Even with the struggles of distance, zoom, and the technical difficulties associated with them, I learned and gained much through the club. STEM and engineering jobs and fields are the waves of the future, and as Ramaz students, we need to be prepared for that. The pandemic’s effects haven’t slowed down progress, and it certainly hasn’t stopped the Coding Club from educating the next generation of software developers.

SENIOR TEC ELECTIVE Business Technology

By Keren Kubersky ‘21 Mr. Vovsha’s Business Technology course focused on the various aspects of creating a business, and specifically the technological aspects of the process. The class was geared toward students interested in entrepreneurship, including those who didn’t have any prior knowledge or experience on the subject. We learned about everything starting from pitching ideas to creating a complete business model, and covered a range of topics from why companies create partnerships to how the internet works. Each class prepared us for the final project--the creation of a hypothetical product or service with a tech component,whether it be through an app, website, or physical hardware.

FLEXX allows people to try different types of clothing and participate in fashion trends, without spending a fortune. Customers are able to access a diverse wardrobe of usually unattainable clothing items through our service. After developing FLEXX to the greatest extent possible, we presented our project to the class.

In order to prepare for our presentation, we conducted research into other rental companies, such as “Rent The Runway”, to see how we could differentiate ourselves from the competition. In addition, we talked to family and friends as a part of the customer discovery process, in order to accurately reach our target customer. We also identified partnerships that would be beneficial to our business, such as designers, fashion institutions, and delivery companies.

Furthermore, we calculated potential revenue using models that Mr. Vovsha taught in class.

Homeworks included creating a business pitch for an existing product, designing a website for our final projects using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and analyzing different companies’ initial pitch decks.

The final project consisted of a presentation of our hypothetical company’s pitch deck, followed by questions from a panel of teachers. For my group’s final project, we created FLEXX, a subscription-based platform for renting luxury streetwear.

Business Technology is a great way to learn more about entrepreneurship and technology. I now feel like I have the tools to propel myself into the business world.

Our company’s goal was to make luxury streetwear accessible to the average person.

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11th Grade TEC: Coding

By Eric Kalimi ‘22 After spending two years on an in-depth study of Arduino, the 11th-grade curriculum felt completely different. The shift of focus from hardware to software is drastic, but it allows our coding abilities to reach a much higher level. I used to believe that software’s only purpose was to control components such as motors or sensors, but this class taught me and my classmates that it can do much more.

The course teaches everything from the bottom up, meaning that absolute beginners who never used Python before, like me, can understand everything. Even before our class wrote our first lines of code, we discussed the fundamentals of computer science to explain how computers can function. Our coding journey began with learning how to display letters or numbers. By working on assigned problems, our coding abilities quickly became much more advanced to a point where we could store, analyze, and use complex data.

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Besides learning how to program, the course focuses on problem-solving techniques that apply in any field.

After working on complex problems independently or in a small group, we reconvene as a class to discuss how to simplify the task at hand to break it down into more easily achievable subproblems.

These skills are essential for the end of semester final project.

To show their abilities at the end of each semester, students present independent or group projects to faculty and other students. Projects vary from election polling systems to a sports statistics analyzer to an automatic email writer to digital instruments to games and more.

My group’s project for the first semester was an online casino with animations that allowed any number of players to gamble on Black Jack, Rock Paper Scissors, TicTac-Toe, and Connect 4 until they run out of money. With the new data storing techniques we learned during the second semester, our coding abilities allowed us to attempt a project that required more efficiency and complexity. For our second semester project, we engineered a system that suggests movies to the user based on other movies they’ve enjoyed. My partners and I enjoyed both working together as a group and our discussions about how to solve the many problems that we came across in our code.

HSS Computer Science

By Abe Coburn In Ramaz’s senior honors Computer Science class, we started off by covering the fundamentals of computer science. This included an explanation of binary code, the language used by computers; compilers, which take code that humans write and help computers process it (by turning it into binary); and finally coding languages, which was the main focus of the course.

Learning about how we actually interact with computers was not only essential for understanding the code we would write throughout the year, but also for putting our work into perspective.

After building this foundation for ourselves, we began to talk about the coding language we would be learning: Java, which is the subject of the AP test. Since the 11th grade coding curriculum focuses on Python, a different language, we started by discussing the differences between the two, such as type-strictness, syntax, and how their compilers work. We also used this discussion as an opportunity to talk about more subtle characteristics of coding, as well as the decisions designers have to make while building a language.

Next, we learned about more complicated aspects of computer science and used them to explore increasingly intricate problems. The first of these aspects was the idea of object-oriented programming

(OOP), which is a sort of organizational tool used by programmers to deal with larger, more complex problems. Another idea in computer science we discussed was that of recursion, an essential method of problemsolving in the field. Recursion is the concept of representing a complicated problem by its smaller, more manageable sub-problems. In practice, this means repeatedly breaking the problem down and solving its simplest parts (through a self-calling function) until the entire problem has been solved.

Once we had mastered problem-solving in Java, we all chose projects to work on for the final part of the semester. I decided to build a chess game from scratch and implement a bot for the user to play against, an endeavor which required many hours of work and resulted in over 1200 lines of code. And as part of my spring exploration, deciding that the bot I had created was not good enough, I began to experiment with artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning (the process of giving something called a neural network the freedom to mathematically explore and solve problems autonomously). I used an online database of 1,000,000 chess puzzles and their respective solutions to train a deep neural network, which ultimately achieved an accuracy of over 25% — meaning that it solved the puzzles correctly over a quarter of the time.

Unfortunately, I discovered chess-puzzle mastery does not translate to chess-playing mastery, and my AI was not very talented in the end.

While some of my results were not particularly satisfying, I am still proud of the work I conducted during my year as an AP Computer Science student. Moving on, I will continue to experiment with the same ideas and concepts I have been exploring, and I have no doubt that the problemsolving skills I learned in this class will help me throughout my future, in the computer science field and other areas alike.

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10th Grade TEC Class Josh Todes ‘23 and Elliot Davis ‘23 Last year in TEC we continued to learn more about microcontrollers. There are so many complex technological devices being used by everyone every single day. Whether it’s in a device where you realize it or not, computer chips are everywhere. That is why it is so essential to learn how to understand them and how they work. The first step is understanding microcontrollers. codes to be more efficient. After learning about interrupts and basic loops, we experimented with ultrasonic sensors that require interrupts in order to be fully functional.

Along with this, we also created a game with multiple red LEDs and one green LED and the user had to press the button when the green LED turned on. This code required many loops in order to be efficient and operational.

A microcontroller bridges the hardware and the software, allowing us to control devices using code. One of the most popular microcontrollers for recreational purposes is the arduino uno. This year we started experimenting with interrupts over the course of the first semester. The first task that we completed was creating a circuit with a push button that controlled whether the LED turned on or off. After completing this basic project, we attempted to achieve the same result by adding an interrupt into our code. An interrupt allows the code to react to a change in voltage and makes the code skip to the interrupt and then return after the interrupt is complete. We also dealt with basic loops like for, while, and if...else statements that enabled our

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During the second semester we applied our knowledge from the first semester in order to create a fully functional prototype. We started by researching issues that needed to be fixed. Our groupmates found out that between 1996 and 2005 an average of 355 people were killed annually in pursuit related crashes. As a result, we decided to design a system that would prevent things like this from ever happening. The system’s design takes both the officer’s safety and the civilian’s safety into account. The system allows the officer to enter a license plate number through a keypad, then he must scan his finger print for authentication, and only then he is able to stop the vehicle with a switch. Without what we had learned in class about interrupts, this project would have been impossible to complete.

Faculty Ms. Lenore Brachot Ms. Lenore Brachot teaches the HSS Chemistry course and chairs both the Science and RamTEC departments. She loves observing the RamTEC classes and seeing kids tinkering. Her favorite part of the TEC curriculum is “seeing the creativity and hard work of our students when building their projects at the end of the year.”

Dr. Fabio Nironi Dr. Fabio Nironi teaches the 10th grade Engineering classes, in addition to 9th grade Honors Geometry, 11th grade Algebra 2 & Trigonometry, 12th grade Honors Seminar Calculus, and he is the chair of the Math department. Dr. Nironi brings his engineering background and passion for the latest technology into his teaching. Dr. Nironi’s favorite part of teaching TEC is “watching students play with new toys”.

Dr. Ethan Rotenberg Dr. Ethan Rotenberg teaches half of the 9th grade TEC classes in addition to three tenth grade Chemistry classes. Dr. Rotenberg brings his creativity and knowledge to the TEC curriculum. His favorite part of teaching TEC is “watching students acquire new skills and use them to figure out on their own how to accomplish new tasks.”

Mr. Ethan Fuld Mr. Ethan Fuld is excited to start as the newest TEC teacher at Ramaz. A Ramaz alum himself, Mr. Fuld took AP Computer Science back in the day! In addition to the HSS Computer Science course, Mr. Fuld teaches half of the 9th grade TEC courses, all the 10th grade Web design elective sections, and the 11th grade python elective. He is also the faculty advisor of the coding club. So far, his favorite part of teaching TEC is “seeing the excitement students have at solving a problem they never thought they could.”

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The Rabbi Joseph H. Lookstein Upper School of Ramaz in the Morris & Ida Newman Educational Center 60 East 78th Street, New York, NY 10075

Special Thanks to the Aronow Family for their generous support of STEAM programming at Ramaz