The Jewish Lyceum No. 144 named after Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, a leading educational institution of the Jewish Community of Dnipro, has achieved a new major success – the project of the lyceum students Maksym Kandybur, a student of grade 9-A, and tenth-grader Grigoriy Kolobov was successfully defended at the in-person stage of the prestigious STEM Leadership School program, organized by the Foundation of the President of Ukraine for the Support of Education, Science, and Sports.
Earlier we told in detail about this project, developed by the lyceum students under the guidance of the teacher of physics and the integrated STEM course, Yaroslav Fedko, and now, during the in-person stage, the team took part in lectures, discussions, and work on the development of their idea, and then presented their project “A Research Ecological STEM Laboratory for Monitoring the Soils of Dnipro and the Region” for the consideration of the program’s experts.
The project envisions that schoolchildren will take soil samples, measure its indicators, and enter the results into a digital database, with high school students able to coordinate the research and analyze the collected data. Special attention is planned to be given to the state of the soils of Dnipro and the region, in particular to the ecological consequences of our difficult times.
For the lyceum, the value of this work is not limited to the successful defense of the project. It gives the students the opportunity to go beyond the textbook – to conduct field measurements, to work with test kits, to make sense of the results obtained, and to seek answers to real questions important for their native land. Ahead lies the further development of the project, the involvement of schoolchildren in research, and its practical implementation.
“We are proud of our students and their mentor, who with research enthusiasm took on a task connected with the future of our city and region,” noted the director of the Jewish Lyceum, Olena Krasnova. “Such projects help children see that knowledge is needed not only for good grades but also for understanding the world and for responsible action. Creating such an educational environment for them is an important part of the mission entrusted to the lyceum by the united and cohesive Jewish Community of Dnipro under the leadership of Chief Rabbi Shmuel Kaminezki.”
