Leading the way

Despite his engineering projects helping people around the world and his students winning top honors across the state, a dose of humilityand an easy smile are what greet visitors to Chris Bond’s engineering classroom at Hewitt-Trussville High School. 

Bond was named the Alabama Project Lead the Way (PLTW) Engineering Teacher of the Year in late 2016, and HTHS Assistant Principal Joy Young was named Alabama PLTW Administrator of the Year. 

Bond has been teaching for a decade and co-founded the engineering academy at the school. He uses the PLTW curriculum — the nation’s leading engineer program, and teaches Engineering Design and Development, Introduction to Engineering Design, and Principles of Engineering. 

PLTW brings much to Trussville classrooms, Bond said. 

“It is project-based learning and open-ended learning,” he said. “When you mesh those together, you get thinking and problem solving. Two key aspects involved are skills they need to be successful in life — no matter their occupation.  First, it gets them interested in a field to discover if it’s for them; second, it gets them to think.” 

In the academy’s senior class, Bond asked students to find a problem that exists in the world and to solve it. 

One student team designed a wheelchair that operates with the sound of a voice, similar to Amazon’s Echo, for quadriplegics or those with cerebral palsy. 

“It will give them freedom to move about,” Bond said, adding, “to be able to say ‘wheelchair forward’ and it moves.”

Another group is working on a project for those with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which affects the nervous system and weakens muscles. For people who have reached the final stages in life and can’t communicate, they’ve devised a “sip ’n puff” that can blow Morse code to text or display their thoughts to loved ones. 

“We have projects that are grandiose-type and then there are others,” Bond said. 

Those others include a makeshift kickstand for amountain bike.

“We have some kids who love mountain biking, and mountain bikes don’t have kickstands,” he said. “It’s like the fanny pack for runners — they don’t have them because they don’t look good. The students are designing components to do a makeshift kickstand from the bike seat.” 

Bond said one of his favorite projects from years past was a smart cane for the vision-impaired. 

“A lot of times, the blind don’t want to ask for directions,” he said. “We designed a cane that would provide a path and can be placed on any type of medium — concrete, whatever. It would lead them to the bathroom or the restaurant, wherever.” 

Another project was one for hikers that converts the movement from a trekking pole into storable electricity with use of an interior magnet. Another is a way for countries that have high levels of arsenic in their groundwater to have safe drinking water. 

“A lot of the students make me proud,” Bond said. 

Many designs make it to science and engineering fairs across Alabama — beating out hundreds of others for top honors. But overall, the projects of his 125 or so students are dictated by what they find interesting or are passionate about. There are no requirements to be in the academy as a freshman, since it’s an elective class. 

“We have valedictorians and we have students with IEPs,” Bond said. “You don’t know who’s going to be successful based off grades. I have some students who might be doing poorly in their core classes, but in here, they’re doing great. It’s just a different learning style.”

The majority of his students do aspire to become engineers, but some are future accountants or mechanics or any number of career aspirations, he said.

“Everyone has problems to solve,” Bond said. “My goal is for the students to walk away a better person, to have enjoyed learning new things, and for me to have had a positive effect on their life or who they are as a person,” Bond said. 

HTHS engineering academy serves as a model school for engineering in Alabama, and Bond has been a PLTW master teacher for three years, meaning he is involved in its curriculum, development, training teachers and more. 

“I don’t think I could teach anything else,” he said. “The way it’s set up, it’s so beneficial to a student. I’m totally bought into the pedagogy of how PLTW teaches the students. The premise is, ‘You’ve learned something, so now let’s apply it.’”