No one likes pests, especially not Chanokh Berenson. The science teacher planted a garden of Japanese lilies in front of his Kemp Mill house, but the next morning, his flowers were all gone, devoured by deer.
That’s why a group of five students from Berman Hebrew Academy in Rockville created an artificial intelligence-powered garden protection system. Their invention, HADAR — Home Auto Defense Against Rodents — detects garden pests and uses a high-pitched speaker to safely deter them.
“These guys really took that idea and ran with it,” said Berenson, Berman’s science department chair.
The Berman engineering team won first place in the Center for Initiatives in Jewish Education’s technology competition on Nov. 16. Their prize? An opportunity to partner with a law firm to get the product patented.
The team originally thought to incorporate a water gun type of device, then came up with the idea of using a dog whistle-like noise to scare pests away. But that backfired.
“For the second version of the product, we had an issue where [HADAR] would scare away dogs, and not the intended thing, like deer and anything else that would eat your plants,” said Navon Leibtag, a junior at Berman and the team’s lead engineer.
That small hiccup in the process led the team to incorporate AI, specifically a camera that detects a deer or rodent versus a dog or human. The technology uses a collection of many images, and the camera compares the video to this collection to determine whether the animal more closely resembles a deer or a dog. To build that model, Leibtag took lots of images and labeled them with what they are.
Though the team had Berenson’s support, the work came entirely from the students over the past two academic years. The result is a “pest-free outdoor space” that doesn’t require chemicals, traps or messy cleanups, according to HADAR’s website.
Each May, high school students compete on Innovation Day for the chance to present their projects at CIJE Tank, a “Shark Tank”–style competition. Judges selected HADAR among more than 500 entries presented at Innovation Day, marking the first time a Maryland team was invited to CIJE Tank.
Leibtag, Erez Zaghi, Alexander August, Leor Hochstein and Shia Herzfeld presented their latest prototype to a panel of judges in Queens, in New York City. HADAR took first place in Engineering and Entrepreneurship out of 11 projects.
“It was just electric,” Herzfeld, a senior at Berman and the team’s project manager, said of their win. “We worked really hard for this, and it felt really good to win.”
“It was the greatest moment of my entire life and the greatest achievement of my high school career,” said Hochstein, a senior at Berman and the team’s strategist.
The panel of three judges appreciated the team’s scientific approach. In the students’ presentation, they showed examples of a garden with HADAR installed and a garden without. The results were clear.
“With no HADAR system set up, plants get eaten all over the place,” Berenson explained. “It’s a real endemic in Kemp Mill and a lot of the communities we live in: deer eat everything. We have a lot of data on that.”
In the trial process, the team set up HADAR, which worked effectively for days: “It scared away the deer, no problem,” Berenson said.
The issue came when Berenson removed the device the night before CIJE Tank, and his Japanese lilies vanished again.
Alexander August, one of the team’s data analysts, consulted 100 local gardeners — 84% of them said they had trouble keeping animals out of their gardens and more than half have spent at least $100 trying to deter garden pests.
As strategists, Hochstein and Herzfeld brainstormed the best way to present this information to the judges and demonstrate a need for HADAR.
“I think that our data analyst did a great job of capturing our judges and just making sure that they knew how important our data was,” Hochstein said.
The collaboration process was smooth, given the boys’ camaraderie as a team.
“We’re all pretty good friends from home and we have that chemistry built up,” Zaghi said.
“I think everyone knows their role,” August added. “Everyone knew who the AI person is, who could design everything, who could strategize, who could collect data, and I think we all just agreed upon [our roles] the first day and evolved from there.”
Herzfeld, August and Zaghi have worked together since 2023, along with Berman student Isaac Chinn, who thought of the idea for HADAR. The four created the original prototype and entered it at Innovation Day.
“We didn’t win anything that first year,” Berenson said. “Then they redid their idea and added the AI — that was the new category for CIJE.”
They took second place in the AI category in 2024, but that didn’t fully satisfy them.
“We wanted to win,” Zaghi said. “I’ve grown up with all these kids and getting second place hit the wrong spot in a lot of us. … So we realized the only way to win the competition is if we work weekly and work really hard.”
Since CIJE’s engineering course is an elective, the team met during lunch to work on HADAR and held brainstorming sessions last summer.
“We’re coming from a small community, and no Berman team has ever made it this far,” Zaghi said. “So we just wanted to prove what Maryland is made of and make school history.”
Their consistent effort is in part because the team thinks of themselves as “underdogs.”
“We had a long streak of not winning,” Hochstein said.
“I think [over] the past two years, we didn’t really feel recognized,” Herzfeld said. “This was a great way of showing everyone what we did.”
The team members have upgrades in mind for HADAR: waterproofing and adding solar panels.
“These students have their eyes on the goal and they have many ideas,” Berenson said.
