After completing this full term, I realized that I have significantly learned more than I had initially predicted before starting this course. I have gained vital and noteworthy knowledge regarding the engineering aspect of designing process. The most important goals of the courses that I agree with is planning, designing, modeling, and analyzing. To make a successful bridge, I was required to put intensive planning and testing, which continuously changed as I learned new concepts every week. It was also helpful and interesting to model different types of bridges, such as knex for physical models and West Point Bridge Design for computer models. In addition, we spent time learning how analyze the effects of loads on bridges like real engineers would, for example the “Method of Joints.” Unfortunately, there are some goals that I do no agree with for this course. First of all, this project barley required any teamwork, for the bridge design and website assignments. Most of the work was considerably easy and possible to be accomplished by one person alone. Therefore, I believe this project should not be considered to be a topic for ENGR-102 because it is scientifically unproductive and easy compared to the NXT Robot module. In conclusion, this project was beneficial for me learn how to plan and use analyzes to make a effective design. For future references I would recommend making students do more types of analysis and add more constrains on the bridge to make the assignment difficult.
Last week in lab we had tested our final knex bridge, which spanned 36 inches and had the new constrains. Our bridge exceeded our expectations and uphold 31.8 pounds, with a reasonable cost of 359,500. The bridge failed in the area between the center and right end of the bridge, which we did not expect. This week in lab, we will briefly summarize everything that we covered and learned during this course.
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