A team of students from AMIT Gwen Straus Junior and Senior Science High School for Boys in Ra’anana won first place in the technology category of the Ramon Foundation’s SpaceLab competition.
Twenty-three schools from around the country competed in the finals that took place at Tel Aviv’s opera house last week. Each team’s experiment, which they had been working on for months, was presented to the judges in front of an audience of astronauts, officials from NASA, representatives from the Israel Space Agency, and other notable figures.
The Gwen Straus students’ experiment explored whether plastic-eating bacteria function in space, and whether they could be used to help solve the world’s plastic waste problem and even generate energy. The students designed the experiment in collaboration with Professor Ariel Kushmaru of the environmental biotechnology lab at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev.
There were other AMIT schools that competed in the finals, including AMIT Eitan High School for Boys Maaleh Adumim and AMIT Yud Ashdod High School.
In the junior division, Yeshiva AMIT Eli came in 2nd place, among 150 other schools, in the “Clark challenge” (Rube Goldberg project).
The SpaceLab program teaches students about Ilan Ramon, z’’l, Israel’s first astronaut who died tragically in the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia mission, and his son Assaf, z’’l, a pilot who died at age 21 during a training exercise. Through project-based learning, the students perform a number of tasks that equip them with the knowledge and skills needed to submit their experiments to the International Space Station.
Participation in the competition, and the students’ success, is a result of an AMIT curriculum that emphasizes STEM, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, which gives students a 21st-century edge in their education to assume 21st -century careers in the future.
Rabbi Sagi Rosenbaum, the principal of Gwen Straus’ science and technology track, congratulated the students on their win. “I’m sure that they will go far, perhaps even to space,” he said. “We are proud to take part in this meaningful and fascinating program.”
