Week 10

In the past week, we tested our bridge in class using the same method we used to test the 24" span bridge.  A bucket was hung from the bridge and sand was added until the bridge failed.  We predicted that our bridge would hold 35 pounds before it broke under pressure.  We were only 1.6 pounds off.  The actual weight it was able to support was 36.6 pounds.  We were pleased with the results, our improvements were successful but there were still more aspects that could be improved to lower the cost to weight ratio. Our major accomplishment was testing the bridge and seeing results that were more successful than our 24" span bridge.  What we focused on changing worked for our design.  There were no major issues that we encountered.  This week we are going to review the results of the survey that Professor Mitchell has conducted.  It will be interesting to see my peers reactions to the course.  I am expecting to see a positive reaction from most of the class.

This course was extremely beneficial to me as an engineering student.  I learned a sufficient amount in each area of the course goals.  I learned a great deal about teamwork throughout the entire engr 10X sequence.  Teamwork is something that we are going to use for the rest of our careers being in the engineering field.  It is extremely important to develop good teamwork skills early on.  Teamwork gives us the chance to see problems and solutions from different point of views.  Our minds all work differently and we come up with different ways to accomplish the same task.  This course did a very good job integrating planning, documenting, and the design processes.  We were forced to do this each week on our blogs.  It proved that this it is extremely important and beneficial to document the progress and steps in a process.  There are things that we did in the first few weeks of class that I would have forgotten about if they were not documented in our blog.  We mainly documented information after we did tests.  We could have improved our documentation method by taking more pictures and notes while were in the middle of the design and building process.  The design process was learned by working hands on.  We worked with computer software to make computer models of bridges to analyze.  Then we worked on physical modeling, testing, and forensic and static analysis.  Each of these stages is crucial to the design process and this course enforced that.  I learned something from each part of this course.  There was not a part that I felt was a waste of time and not beneficial in some way.  The least beneficial component for me was the method of joints.  It was interesting to learn and compute but I did not feel that it was really used in the course to help with analysis and prediction.  It would have been helpful to apply it more to make accurate predictions about the loads our bridge will hold.  The most beneficial part of this course was the split between individual work and teamwork and learning about the design process.  The split between the work was important and beneficial because it forced us to collaborate as a team but we each got the experience of competing each part of the work.  The design process is best taught by experience.  This was a main component of the class, I learned a lot about the entire process overall and it helped me to understand more clearly how actual engineering projects are carried out.  The only suggestion that I have to improve this course is to spend more time using analysis to improve designs and predict the outcomes.  Overall, I really enjoyed this course and benefited tremendously from it.