Week 10-Cameron

After rereading the course goals, I feel that great strides were made throughout this course by myself as well as my group mates.   Teamwork is something that not just this course, but the ENGR 10X sequence as a whole, has brought to the forefront of our education here as Drexel engineering students.  Working as part of a team is an integral part of any engineering project as other group members may have a different vision than your own.  That difference of opinions does not in any way prove either one wrong, but it allows each opinion to be reworked to include the best elements of both.  This is how engineers collaborate. 

I also think that the planning stages rely heavily on the teamwork aspect as each group member had their own ideas for each of the projects.  This variety allowed for multiple initial plans, which then forced us to analyze each one specifically to decide which one was the "best."  Just as any type of design, our designs went through many different stages before reaching a point of finalization.  One thing that is mentioned in the course goals is documentation which I think we could have improved upon a little bit.  We seemed to focus too much on the after aspect of documentation, but should have been taking photos and recording our progress all along.  One thing that helped pick up our slack was the blog site that we created as we could use it to refer back to what we had done in the previous week and compare it to the point that we were currently at. 

In terms of the remaining course goals, I think things were learned in each area.  Before completing this course I had no idea what West Point Bridge Designer software was, but after using the program I definitely can see myself using it in the future either for fun or for actual modelling. 

In my opinion the only aspect of this course which I did not find beneficial was learning the method of joints.  Although it is an extremely important method of truss analysis, it is basic physics which I have been learning since my junior year of high school.  I do appreciate learning the method of joints, but I think that less time could be spent on it in this course and the same effect would be achieved.

The most beneficial aspect of this course was the hands on design process from start to finish.  I enjoyed designing a truss using computer aided design, implementing that design using K'nex, and finally testing a small-scale version of the design to determine its strengths and weaknesses, literally.  I find it hard to learn new things out of a textbook, which is why the hands on approach that this course took was very beneficial for me.  I honestly can not think of ways to improve this course, as it was one of the most rewarding courses I have taken during my freshman year.

Last week in class, we tested our designs using the same method as we did for the 24 inch span bridge.  Based on tests that we had conducted during week 8, we predicted that our bridge would be able hold 35 pounds which was only 1.6 pounds away from reality.  After the final test was completed our bridge held 36.6 pounds.  Overall we were happy with the results; our cost to weight ratio could have been lower, but considering the improvement we made over the previous design, we were satisfied with the results.

This week we look forward to going over the results of the survey that Dr. Mitchell had sent out earlier in the week.  It will be interesting to see everyone's feedback on the course.