Week 10 - Term Review

Before going into class, I did not expect to learn much since I did not learn much in previous two terms. But as this term progresses, I realized that I have learned so many worthwhile knowledge about the whole designing process. There were new learning experiments each week throughout the term. First, we were exposed to two softwares —West Point Bridge Designer and online Bridge Designer. Both of the softwares were helpful in terms of planning the bridge ahead of time before we actually start to build the bridge.  They also gave me a good understanding of how the forces cause impact on each of the pieces in the bridge. The part that I like the most was building the actual bridge using Knex pieces. Some of the notable accomplishments were Truss analysis, modeling using the softwares, and calculate the tension and compression forces using MOJ. 

I enjoyed every second of that class; I especially like how we recorded everything on our blog.  The part that was most beneficial to me was Bridge Designer since we have to at least meet the minimum requirement in order to see the forces acting upon each of the members. Then the part that was least beneficial was the West Point Bridge Designer. Even though it was fun messing around with all the different lengths chords, but it was not that helpful when we actually had to build the bridge. For future references, I think students should spend more time on analyzing and building more bridges using Knex with more constraints.  

Last week in class, we tested our final bridge, recorded the load failure and analyzed the point of failure. Our bridge ended up being $409,000 and it held about 30.2 pounds.  The actual load failure was lower than what we had expected, but it is close enough. Then this week in class, we will be finalizing the project as a whole and discuss what we have learned.