A2 Details

A2 Assignment - Knex Bridge Design

Overview

Each individual will develop a Knex design and document it, with a prediction of how much weight it will hold. The documentation will be a blog post about their design.

Slide Show with Details

This is the link to the PowerPoint show that Prof. Mitchell used in class.

Details

• Work within the constraints for the Knex bridge defined below to develop a bridge with the lowest possible cost spanning the defined gap.
  • We recommend, but do NOT require that each team member develop a different type of bridge.
• Create a post within your team's blog with the following characteristics
  • Post name is "A2 -YOURLASTNAME" where you put your last name instead of YOURLASTNAME
  • The post contains
  1. A statement of your design goals - why your bridge is the shape it is
  2. An image of your design in "elevation" (side view)
     1. Label it with dimensions, at least the major and typical ones
        1. A program such as Inkscape can be very helpful here or GoogleDoc's drawing tool
        2. You may also do your drawing by hand and scan it
  3. An image of your design in "plan" (top view)
     1. Label it with dimensions, at least the major and typical ones
  4. An image of a "Truss Bill of Materials" spreadsheet image showing your components and the total cost
     1. You can download the spreadsheet from Google Docs - it will open in your browser, but will probably be ugly.  Download it to your machine.  It should work fine within Excel
  5. A statement of how your bridge changed during design
  6. What you learned from designing this bridge.

Tools

• Drawing tool, hand or computer
  • GoogleDoc's Drawing Program should be very helpful Inkscape or similar "vector" tool is recommend
• Blogger
• Excel

Constraints

• Bridge "span" is 2' - there will be a gap up to that wide your bridge must cross
  • There must be flat pieces at the extreme ends on the bottom for the bridge to rest on a table
  • There must be an 8" wide flat portion on the top of bridge on which the loading apparatus will sit
• The goal is to create the best "Cost/Failure-Load" ratio - The lowest number is best

Deliverables

• Web Post as part of your Blog with the content defined above
• URL of post (not general blog) submitted to VistaBB assignment

Grading Criteria

Criteria	Points	Comment
Grammar & Spelling	2
Overall Completeness	1
Design Goals	2
Elevation Image	2
Plan Image	2
Bill of Materials	2
How Bridge changed during design	2
What you learned from designing the bridge	2
Total	15