Showing posts with label assignment. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Attending Presentations in Week-10

Dr. Primerano asked me to clarify that we want you to attend three presentations by students in other sections. You’ll have an excellent opportunity to see the wide variety of projects undertaken by your classmates.

We elected not to require presentations in our sections, substituting the bridge testing in Week-9 in its stead. However, becoming familiar with presentations as both an observer and a presenter is an important skill for all engineers.

Monday, June 4, 2012

Week-10 Presentations - Why We're Not Making Them

Question:

Why don't we have a presentation time for our project? I don't mind that we don't have to do that extra work, but I'm curious about your reasoning on this decision.

Response:

My belief when putting together this course was that the week-10 presentations didn't make sense for our sections for the following reasons:

Everybody is doing the same thing in our sections, whereas other sections have more varied projects. I felt it would become boring to everyone to hear the same issues addressed many times.
I asked a considerable effort of you in putting together the weekly posts as well as the assignments. Making the last week a lighter load seemed like a good idea.

I'd be glad to hear from the class if you think adding the presentations another time would be beneficial.

Jim Mitchell

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Comp-2 Corrections

Question 1

I believe there is an error in the COMP2 description where it says "When you have completed your initial WPBD design you'll submit the results to an online spreadsheet including....". I believe it should say Knex instead of WPBD, correct?

Response

You are correct. I have corrected the page to reflect that.

Question 2

… only one person per group needs to turn in the COMP2 right? Or do all the members of the group have to complete/submit it?

Response

Yes. Only one person per group needs to submit Comp-2

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Units for Results

At 10:47pm the day before the assignment was due I was asked the following question.

“Is it ok if we converted pounds to newtons and feet to meters to do the calculations?”

Response

You may work internally in any units you wish, but results should always be shown in the units of the country in which you work unless told otherwise. If I were working in almost anyplace other than the US then newtons and meters would be the appropriate units. In our backward (in terms of units) country we still use feet, inches and pound-force and expect to see them in the results.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

A3 - Part-5 Clarification

Question:

Did you say that only one group member needed to complete task 5 for Assignment 3? It asks us to use Bridge Designer to model our Knex Truss, and right now only one member of our group has the bridge with them.

Response:

You only have to perform the "Bridge Designer" analysis once in each group. Each member, however, is to include the results of the analysis (part #1) and perform part #2 of Task 5 individually, though you're welcome to coordinate with your team members.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Week-6 - Bridge Testing - Lessons Learned

Your Results - You can see the spreadsheet here

Lessons About the Rules

The SPAN is 24" - NOT the length of your bridge
- Your bridge must be longer than 24" to allow the supports at the end
- The next bridge will require a SPAN of 36"
The Width of your bridge matters

For your last bridge the width must be at least 3.5"

Vehicles should be able to drive across the bridge

For your last bridge there must be a "tube" at least 3" wide x 2" high - continuous

You can only contact the supports at one level at each end

For the next bridge we will span between the tables, a plywood surface.
There will not be the "V" to take advantage of from the sawhorses

No one will be penalized this time for not meeting the requirements, except it must span 24" - there was no grade for this testing. There will be for week-9

Lessons about Bridge Building - Your Observations

Most failures occurred at gusset plates
There were unexpected failure modes - e.g. twisting
Long pieces passing through gusset pieces helped some groups

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Calculating Triangle Angles and Trigonometric Values

To analyze a truss there is often a good deal of trigonometry involved to calculate the components of forces. To make things simpler (I hope), I’ve created a simple excel spreadsheet that will allow you to calculate angles, sines, cosines, and tangents if you know the length of the legs of any triangle. This should ease the calculation burden somewhat. You might well wish to use this sheet as a starting point to make your truss calculations even readily modifiable.

Here’s the link to the spreadsheet.

Download the spreadsheet to Excel to see the diagram that explains the notation.

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Truss Bill of Materials Typo Correction

Question:

I think there is an error in the excel spreadsheet that calculates the bridge cost. The member length after 1.25 should be 2.125 instead of 1.125 correct?

Response:

Indeed there is a typo in the Truss Bill of Materials. Part #2 should be 2.125” in length rather than the 1.125” indicated in the description.

I corrected it on the server at about 7:15 on 5/1/2012

The cost is still correct.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Blog Addresses for Students in Prof. Mitchell’s Bridge Sections

Below are the blog addresses of the students in these sections, sorted by last name. This list was generated from the A1 assignment submission so there are some blog addresses missing, either because no blog URL was submitted, or the editing URL rather than the published URL was submitted.

“Not Available” means that the URL submitted was the editing URL – only the owner can see that
A blank URL means no URL was submitted.

You can see the blog by clicking the URL. To find the particular post of interest you will need to:

Use the “labels” that (we hope) each student applied
Scroll through the blog.

Name URL of Blog

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Posting Mechanism

Question:

Last week for the teamwork post my group posted them as comments on our "Weekly post" page. For the A1 assignment we have to make a post and title it and when ever we try to make a post it always goes to our home page. How should we go about posting it?

Response:

Without looking at your blog I cannot be certain about this answer, but it sounds to me as though you're probably doing the correct thing. The idea behind a blog is that the latest post is always at the top of the list, with previous posts following on the page. To see previous posts you can:

Scroll down the main page - usually a limited number of posts will be scrollable
Search the blog for key words
Use the "labels" (sometimes called "tags") to click and see the posts with those labels
Use the chronology to show those posts happening at a given time.

Note that you don't want to "comment" on a previous post, you want to create a new post each time. You add comments only when you want the comment to stick with the post as a comment.

To get the URL of your specific post:

Display the post on your page - that's what happens usually when you "publish" your post or search for it
Click on the title of the post

That displays that post only, with the URL in the "Location Bar"

Copy the URL from the location bar

Saturday, April 14, 2012

Comp-1 = A1 Survey – Please complete this survey of your design results

Updated 4/17/2012 4:05PM to make it clear this is the Comp-1 assignment.

In the week-3 lab we’ll be reviewing the results of your A1 designs and then each team will develop an improved design in class.
To allow us to compare the designs and perhaps draw some inferences we’re asking you to complete a Google Docs survey that documents some aspects of bridge that you’ve designed, as well as the URL of your A1 blog post.
You’ll receive a very similar email asking you to do the same thing. This post is just a readily accessible place to go to the survey.

Link to Survey - This is the Comp-1 survey

You’ll be able to see the results in spreadsheet form here.

Bring your Bridge Design with you

As the survey notes, you’ll want to modify your bridge design in class so please bring your file with you:

On a flash drive
On a web site such as Google Docs or DropBox
Email it to yourself

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Field Inspection - Week-3 Discussion Alternate Topic

Those who wish to substitute the following for the discussion portion of the week-3 blog entry may do so. Understand that you still include the notebook entries on what you did and what you're going to do.

Field Inspection

Safely visit a truss bridge, take photos, make observations on its function and its status. By status we mean.

Its overall condition
Whether the traffic loads on it appear too great, too little, or about right
Any particular problems you observe, particularly with respect to the truss portion of the bridge

Include the photos in your blog entry as well as your observations.