Week 5

Last week, we got familiar with the K'nex pieces after experimenting and playing around with them during class. We learned a good bit about finding and using resources through the guest speaker also. After examining the K'nex pieces our group felt there weren't many directions we could take with these constraints and our designs tended to be very similar. Our goal is to make a bridge with simple shapes that is both inexpensive and capable of holding up large loads. To prepare for our A1 assignment this week, I've been sketching designs on paper whenever I could and picked my favorite one to sketch out in better detail and scan into the computer for the post. I also came up with my best goal for bridge building, redistributing the tension on the pieces. If the bridge was able to redistribute any tension placed on it evenly throughout the pieces, each piece would be able to take more weight and the bridge will be significantly stronger without worry of one piece being under extreme stress. I also see the shapes used in bridge design to serve this purpose of redistributing tension as I observe real world examples. I'm not too sure how the gusset plates will be able to handle stress in K'nex yet so there is still a lot of testing to be done in order to come up with a good final design.

We will be building prototypes in class soon so I hope to test out my design and see its ability to hold and manage weight and try different methods to get a better grasp of good bridge design.