Through the first half of this term, we were given the opportunity to utilize the West Point Bridge Designer program to learn about truss bridges and how they work. This was a great interactive tool for designing our first sets of truss bridges. but now its time to move on to bigger and better things, and that being Knex. For the 2nd half of the term we will be physically building our own truss bridges and seeing how they hold up to a large load. This is where Knex overrides WPBD, because no computer program can give one a better experience than actually doing it in the real world. Building these Knex bridges allows us on a very small scale to experience first-hand how a truss bridge handles a load, rather than clicking a button and waiting for a result on a computer screen.
Our group spend a large amount of lab time last week becoming as familiar as possible with the Knex pieces. We wanted do our best to find out what exactly can and cant be done with them. We felt that this approach would be the most helpful to us for completing our designs in the upcoming weeks. out of class our time was mainly focused on creating our first Knex design plans for this upcoming weeks lab. That way, we are all ready to go with beginning our builds.
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