Northwest Yeshiva High School students win best engineering awards at national summit
Published 5:30 pm Thursday, June 4, 2026
It’s been an inspirational experience this year for STEM coach Ariela DeFunis, who watched some of her Northwest Yeshiva High School (NYHS) students win best engineering awards at the recent Center for Initiatives in Jewish Education (CIJE) Innovation Summit in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
The Mercer Island resident, who teaches the principles of engineering course at the local Jewish day school, said that she’s impressed with the students’ ability to have an eye for design detail, learn a whole new coding language to construct their projects and more.
“They look literally like they were working in a startup together. It was unbelievable to see kids rise to this occasion of communication with each other,” DeFunis said. “I cannot get over the quality of these projects and the amount of detailed engineering work that went into them. Not to diminish other years, but some of these are very, very difficult projects, and they all worked. It was just incredible.”
At the event, which took place on May 28, NYHS students notched winning medals with their AlephLearn and Grid64 projects.
AlephLearn’s Natalie Aronov, Jessica Berezansky and Izzebella Dillman brought to life a device to help older Hebrew language learners identify Hebrew letters. On the Grid64 front, David Liansky and Mercer Island’s Jonah Negrin developed an AI-incorporated interactive chess board.
Sophomore Aronov enjoyed working on AlephLearn alongside her best friends and then unveiling their project at the competition.
“We definitely didn’t expect to win, but we put in a lot of effort. We had to learn a lot of new things like AI training, which none of us had ever done before,” she said. “We used new devices that we hadn’t used. I don’t think any of us had ever coded a speaker before. That was interesting. It was really fun because of the new things we got to do.”
Aronov and her pals had to overcome some challenges when they got their project parts to New Jersey such as getting their AI element and screen to work and fixing their 3D prints. After a late night of mending things, the tired girls were glad to get their project in working order for the event.
“We didn’t think we would get it finally, but we did,” Aronov said.
NYHS brought two other teams to the competition with their SmartFit and Cycle Guardian projects. SmartFit — which was created by students Daniel Galili, Mercer Islander Levi Schiffman and Audrey Hoffman — is an outfit designer device utilizing Google Vision. The Cycle Guardian safety device from the minds of Carlos Aguillar-Spinoza and Dori Tilson focuses on clear communication between drivers and bikers.
DeFunis gave the teams some pep talks to follow through with their projects during their three-month journey of hatching their ideas to working loads of hours to final assembly in New Jersey the night before the competition.
“I literally bring our whole STEM class in my suitcase and then we set up shop at the hotel in the evening, and then finish up whatever needs to be re-soldered or fixed,” she said.
Team chaperone Jay Schreiber also played a vital role by helping the students with their pitches about the importance of their projects.
