Bryan Staquet

4/11/2012

Week one of Engineering Design Lab consisted mainly of a small lecture about what we will be doing in and out of classroom for the next ten weeks with our groups.  Myself, Louis Schetley, and Bryan Bell planned to work together as a group to create a bridge to compete in the K'Nex bridge competition.  The lecture talked about truss based bridge designs, the types of bridges that we will be creating with K'Nex for the competition as well as the West Point Bridge Design competition.  Real life examples of these bridges were brought up and shown via Google Earth and showed how truss bridge designs can vary based on their span and weight capacity.  We also got a chance to see some examples of the West Point Bridge Design software and how the program works.  In next week's lab we will research ways to build bridges and come up with potential designs for our own bridge.  I personally feel that our group will work well as a team and don't see and major issues in the future.  We may have to deal with conflicting viewpoints on how to accomplish tasks, but in the end I believe we all will agree on ideas that are the best for the group.  To deal with this we will stick to the simple method of majority rules.  The only other potential issue would have to be conflicting schedules which would be a problem when trying to meet outside of class.  We will have to find a time in everyone's schedule that we are able to get together so we can accomplish our weekly tasks and goals.