A technical education teacher in the Mobile, Alabama, area is leading disadvantaged students to change lives in other countries by designing and building prosthetic legs, beach wheelchairs, solar suitcases, basic utility vehicles and other helpful devices.
“It became more about building the kids than building the projects,” Brian Copes, an engineering and career instructor at Chickasaw Middle/High School, told The Alabama Baptist.
When he taught in the Birmingham area several years ago, he noticed some students came early to school and stayed late, and the designing and building captured their attention.
“I was seeing kids engage. I was watching their grades improve, and they were taking leadership roles in their classes,” said Copes, who has taught for 27 years.
The teacher remembers being a child at Vacation Bible School when a missionary speaker asked who would go to the nations. He raised his hand to say, “I’ll go.”
Projects
During his teenage years, Copes heard another missionary talk about smuggling Bibles into Russia behind the Iron Curtain, and he was inspired. His first missions trip was to Liberia in 1985, leaving his family for two months during a high school summer to build a school. While in college, he found himself on Red Square in Moscow during a coup attempt on Mikhail Gorbachev.
With a background in construction and a love of teaching, Copes landed in the classroom as a profession, starting in Chicago, then Indianapolis and then a couple of cities in Alabama.
“My teaching was really transformed when I started taking the things I learned on the missions field — the global problems — and challenged my students to solve these global problems, whether it was basic transportation needs, prosthetics or solar suitcases capable of running a laptop and charging cell phones,” Copes said.
Since the power grid is being bombed in Ukraine, people there have only an hour or two of electricity per day, Copes said. But a solar suitcase designed and built by his students can run a laptop all day, allowing some education to continue amid the strain.
The projects began about 15 years ago when Copes’ eighth grade students in Alabama invented a utility vehicle that could be assembled with simple hand tools by low-skilled laborers.
Finishing first
“At the end of the year, the little vehicle ran, so I entered the eighth grade students in a collegiate engineering competition in Indiana,” he said. They ended up winning first place, ahead of teams such as Purdue University.
Soon the state of Alabama asked Copes to add a biomedical component to his lessons. Though he was a woodworker with no biomedical training, he and the students started thinking. They came up with the idea of making prosthetic legs for amputees.
“We found out that 80% of all amputees live in developing countries,” Copes said. “Amputees are treated like second-class citizens. They become shadows in the community. They can’t work, so they have to beg for a living, and the suicide rate goes up.
“That’s when my students decided we needed to step in and make a difference — change some lives.”
Copes and his students went to the workshop and made their first prosthetic leg using old Toyota Corolla motor mounts for the knee and ankle joints.
“The local artificial limb specialist working with us at the time said, ‘Man, I think this will work.’ He fit it onto an amputee. He said, ‘It’s heavy, but it works,’” Copes recalled.
The next year, Copes challenged his students to make the leg lighter, and they shaved three pounds off the weight.
Partners
Meanwhile, other students were ready to take two utility vehicles to Honduras. One is being used as an ambulance, and one is equipped with a freshwater drill, traveling from village to village drilling wells. The team also delivered 14 prosthetic legs and fit them to amputees.
“We have 24 partner schools around the United States that are helping us manufacture our prosthetic legs,” Copes said. “Our legs are now 3D printed in the classroom. We have a school in Chicago that machines the leg bones for us. We have a school in New York that makes pivot pins.
“We have a school in the Washington state area that makes the rubber torsion spring that we need. They bring it down to us, and we assemble them here in Chickasaw. Then my students go on trips to Latin America.”
This school year, a handful of Chickasaw students at a time have been to Guatemala and to two cities in Mexico, delivering what they have made to help others.
Of all the missions fields he has been on, which includes six continents, Copes considers the public school one of the most important.
“We tell kids they can be anything they want to be, they can change the world, they can change lives, but we never teach them how to change lives,” Copes said. “It’s my job as a career and technical educator to teach the students how to use their math, their English, their science — their core subjects — to change lives.”
Many Chickasaw students have to overcome poverty and other obstacles in order to succeed, Copes said, but he is seeing slow progress in the community.
“Get the kids to believe in themselves, and there’s nothing they can’t do,” he said.
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