From Invention Notebooks to Engineering Classrooms
The ideas were always there. CIJE gave Max Muss the tools to do something with them, and now, as a STEAM educator, he's passing that on to the next generation.
Since he was young, Max Muss kept an invention notebook with pages filled with sketches, wild ideas, and problems he wanted to solve. The only thing missing was a way to actually build any of it.
That changed in high school, when Max enrolled in the engineering course at The Frisch School, powered by CIJE’s curriculum. Within weeks, he had built his first real project: Automated window blinds that adjusted based on sunlight.
“It opened this whole world of creativity,” he recalls. “I always had this journal of invention ideas, but I had no way of actually making anything. Then I got to that class, and I was given the tools to do it.”
A Head Start at Hopkins
Max went on to study mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University and walked in ahead of the curve. While many of his peers were picking up an Arduino for the first time, Max had already spent years prototyping with one.
“A lot of my friends had never used them before,” he says. “For prototyping electromechanical stuff, it was a really powerful tool, and I had a real head start.”
The CIJE Innovation Days stayed with him, too. Working in small teams over an entire semester, students choose a real problem, build a solution from scratch, and then present it to expert judges and their peers. During his sophomore year, Max’s team tackled dysautonomia, a nerve condition that makes regulating body temperature nearly impossible. His team designed a headband with a temperature sensor that applies heat or cooling to the wearer’s wrist, where veins sit close to the surface, and automatically texts a caregiver if readings go outside a safe range.
A few months after presenting their project, Max read about a nearly identical device being developed at the MIT Media Lab. “It was really validating to see that one of the top design studios in the world was working on the same thing I was,” he says. “That was really cool.”
From Industry to the Classroom
After graduation, Max worked as a mechanical engineer at Northrop Grumman, then at CTA Digital, then at a hydraulics company in Colorado. He was good at it, but something felt hollow.
“At Northrop, it’s a 110,000-person company. My work would leave my team and then go on to another team, and because it’s all government defense related, we don’t even necessarily know where it goes,” he says. “It’s hard to feel the impact.”
What he kept coming back to were the moments he spent mentoring others. He thought about the teachers who had shaped him and started to wonder if he could be that for someone else. The math of it appealed to him, too. “As a teacher, your impact is amplified,” he says. “Instead of just one engineer, whatever my contributions are to the world – now as a teacher, if I’m inspiring 20 or 50 students a year, I feel like I have a hand in each of those outputs.”
Paying It Forward
Today, Max teaches full-time middle school science at a Jewish day school, as well as an Arduino elective and a Mythbusters-style science class. Each week, he introduces a new concept, runs a demo build, and sends students off with a design challenge. Soon, he plans to let students choose their own semester-long projects, just as he once did.
“I need to make sure they know the fundamentals first,” he says. “But I think that’s what they’re most excited for. And I don’t blame them. It’s the best part.”
On why hands-on learning matters, he doesn’t hesitate. “There’s a big difference between thinking you understand a concept and actually trying to apply it. When you try to apply it, your brain can’t jump over all those little holes in your understanding. You have to fill them. And that’s a more intellectually honest way of learning, and a more effective one.”
He still keeps the invention notebook. The list of ideas keeps growing. And now, he’s passing that spirit on, one Arduino kit at a time.
Max’s journey from CIJE classrooms to Johns Hopkins to a career in STEAM education is exactly what this work is for. Stories like his are made possible because of donors who believe that every Jewish day school graduate should be equipped to shape the future.
CIJE subsidizes the true cost of membership so schools of all sizes can access these programs, but we can only do that with your support. To learn how to get involved, contact Philip Brazil at pb@thecije.org or (516) 672-2363.
The next Max Muss is sitting in a classroom right now. Help us reach them.