Week 10 blog Post Jordan Banyas

Overall this class was developed to further our understanding of truss analysis, support structures, and bridge building in general. That being said, I believe through this class I now have a much better understanding in all three categories. However, every class has it's ups and downs. The only main complaint I have about my experience in bridge building was that we spent too much time with West Point Bridge Design. Although that helped us understand how bridges worked and how to make the best support structure in that given technology, it did not help us with our over all project of building a bridge that much simply because the forces imposed upon the WPBD bridge was completely different then that of which we exerted on the K-NEX bridge. I think if you were to shorten that section of the class and use that time to teach about truss and joint analysis, the time would be better served. The most beneficial part of this class in my mind was the trial and error period. From week to week my group members and I would come up with a completely new bridge design and test it, record it's strengths and weaknesses, and figure out a way to make it better. Through this we were able to learn a multitude of different ways to improve our support structure. Our hard work came to fruition when our group built the most efficient bridge (or at least most efficient bridge that followed all of the constraints) during last weeks final testing period.