Schetley Weekly Blog - Week 10

Last week in class we finally tested our 38" bridge. We expected our bridge to fail at around 30 pounds, and with a cost of $297,000, that would be a cost-to-strength ratio of a little under $10,000 per pound, which we felt would probably be one of the best ratios in the class. It failed because the weight became too much, starting to contort the bridge and it eventually collapsed (a video of that can be seen here). We actually expected the bridge to fail at the joints on the bottom like it usually did, so we weren't expecting that to happen. To stop that from happening, it would probably require us to strengthen the top of the bridge, or extend the top level of our bridge a bit farther across the bridge.

This being the final weekly blog post of this course, the weekly question we were asked was to look at the course goals listed on the class blog and discuss what we learned from each topic, what was the most beneficial, and what was the least beneficial of all the topics. I didn't really learn much about teamwork since I have been working in group projects since grade school, but I did learn a bit about each of the other topics, especially anything to do with the physical design of the bridge, such as physical modeling, and static analysis of the bridge. These were the most useful of the topics presented, as they provided me hands-on experience (in the case of the physical modeling) and an application of some topics I had been learning about for a while (when using static analysis). The latter answered the question that so many students ask: "Why do we need to learn this?" and that was very beneficial in my opinion. To me the least beneficial topic covered in the course was the topic of computer software. Looking back on it we used four programs: Blogger (which most people, including myself, already know), West Point Bridge Designer (a very basic bridge design software), Bridge Designer (an even more basic bridge software, this one doing load calculations), and Excel (which I knew how to use even better than Blogger before starting the course). This was also somewhat useless since most of these softwares we were introduced to for a week, then we moved on from them and went to work with physical bridges and physical modeling. If I could offer a suggestion, I would either change the amount of computer software lab lessons (I would make it less since I like working with my hands more) and remove the lesson on teamwork, because, as I mentioned, we've been doing group projects since roughly grade school so we should be quite familiar with group dynamics by now.