21 Nov Senior Students Earn High Marks at Engineering Competition
Last week, BCHA’s Upper School seniors Roberto Toraty, Yoav Hochman, Ephraim Stock, and Achiezer Blickstein took the national stage at the Center for Initiatives in Jewish Education (CIJE) Tank 2025, securing an impressive second-place finish in the Advanced Coding and Engineering division.
Earlier this fall, groups from 500 participating Jewish schools, including BCHA, attended CIJE’s Innovation Day in hopes of being one of the 10 schools invited to return for CIJE Tank, a Shark Tank–style competition where students pitch ideas to a panel of potential investors. After a standout performance, a team of four BCHA seniors earned a spot among the finalists for their SmartBin design, an AI-powered recycling system that uses machine learning to automatically sort recyclables into their correct categories.
One of the team’s faculty leaders, William Berson, was especially impressed with the students’ passion and resilience leading up to the competition.
“This is not a project that students have to do; they do not earn a grade, nor is it something the curriculum requires,” said Berson. “These students, in the midst of college applications, standardized testing, and their school requirements, chose to take on this challenge and did so with such determination, I’m immensely proud of them.”
In addition to Berson, the students’ success was supported by faculty mentor Dr. Paul Castle, who teaches all of the computer science and coding classes in BCHA’s engineering department.
This is the highest ranking BCHA has achieved in CIJE Tank, a milestone that reflects the dedication of the students who embraced the project.