What Happened When 25 Teachers
Built Working Apps in 15 Minutes
Picture a student sitting in a Jewish day school classroom today in a job interview 5 years from now. What skills will they need to get the job and succeed at it?
Our community schools are educating the next generation of the Jewish people to thrive in a world being reshaped by AI. It’s critical for our educators to prepare students for this seismic shift.
If the teacher in their classroom is not only using AI but directing it, they will be far more able to educate students to thrive in an AI-driven world.
That shift – from user to architect – is exactly what 35 educators, representing 24 East Coast schools, experienced at this year’s CIJE AI Summit at The Frisch School.
“The AI Summit’s real alchemy happened when teachers collectively grappled with these tools,” said CIJE’s Director of Innovation Orly Nadler. “No longer alone in uncharted territory, they became part of a living network making sense of something genuinely new. That shared journey changes everything.”
Attendees walked away with working tools, a transformed mindset, and a professional community that will follow them into every lesson they teach this fall.
CIJE Mentor Aryeh Laufer presenting at the AI Summit.
The Problem Nobody's Talking About
According to the CIJE AI in Education Poll, 40% of teachers use AI every week to improve their productivity, but only 7% bring it into their students’ learning.
That gap isn’t a technology problem. It’s a training problem.
Keynote speaker and AI-powered startup founder Judah Rabinowitz opened the summit with a story about his son’s early love of programming, then pivoted to a stark reality check: tech companies & startups are now achieving with a team of four what once required thirty people. That’s not a future trend. That’s the job market students will be entering.
“AI without your expertise is just guessing. You are the architect of the context,” he told the audience.
Here’s what that means in practice.
The Insight That Changes How You Teach
Most AI failures aren’t actually AI failures. They’re context failures. When a teacher or student gets a vague, wrong, or made-up answer, it’s almost always because the AI had nothing to work with. As Aryeh put it: “AI without context is just guessing.”
CIJE’s own survey of 105 educators backs this up: 82% cite students’ loss of critical thinking as their top concern, and only 6% of teachers regularly integrate AI into student learning. When teachers and students are trained to provide proper context, AI hallucination rates drop from 40% to just 6%. CIJE’s AI professional development training focuses on ways to use AI that make students think more, not less.
The 15-Minute Moment
After a content-rich morning, Aryeh Laufer issued the challenge to build an app, any app, in 15 minutes. Some educators who’d never written a line of code opened Claude Code and other AI coding tools. Armed with the skills they learned that morning, they made things: rubric feedback generators. Interactive physics simulations. Real, functional classroom tools.
“If you can build something in 15 minutes with no coding experience,” Aryeh said, “imagine what your students can do.”
In a parallel track, Orly Nadler guided teachers through AI Camera applications for prototyping capstone projects ahead of CIJE Innovation Days. Barbara Sehgal led deep dives into AI-driven Scientific simulations, bringing abstract concepts like forces and motion to life through visual, interactive exploration.
What Educators Said
Between sessions, the energy continued. Participants toured the Frisch Maker Space with Head of STEM at Yeshivat Frisch, Rifkie Silverman. Over lunch, teachers from different schools traded hard-won classroom strategies.
Here’s what attendees reflected on the event:
“This is mission-critical. Understanding how to model thoughtful prompts gives me the confidence to teach this on Monday and help my students think more deeply about what we’re learning.”
“Seeing how we can connect an AI engine to help students prototype their capstone projects was a game-changer. It feels like we’re finally giving them the tools to solve real-world problems.”
“This was so applicable. It gave me the tools to help my students think more deeply, not just find answers faster.”
Your Role In What Comes Next
Somewhere in a Jewish day school classroom right now, a student is waiting for a teacher who knows how to do this.
Maybe that teacher is you. Maybe it’s someone in your building who just needs the right training and the right community.
Your support allows CIJE to subsidize these programs so Jewish schools of all sizes can access cutting-edge training and tools like this one.
Ready to bring this to your school?
Schedule an Exploratory Conversation with Faigy Ravitz
Want to make sure the next cohort of educators gets this training?
Donate here, and help us reach every Jewish classroom