CIV Bridge Construction

This a assignment sheet from our much bigger bridge design and construction project. Looking back, there was not much change in the way that I approached this problem compared to the previous bridge problem (see here). My group and I approached it with an extremely similar mindset: find the simplest solution and then use that to accomplish the problem. However, in this project we did look slightly different possible designs. Our first choice was a simple I beam, and when I say we looked at other designs, I simply mean that we looked at variations of an I beam. In that aspect, I feel that I had not learned very much between the first CIV project and this one. But in the aspect of prototyping, I learned a lot. Because we had to construct the bridge that we were designing, we had to calculate how much of the mat-board that we should cut and how much we would be able to use to construct it. So from this project, I drew the importance of the time spent before actually building the prototype - the time spent planning the build. My group had to re-do the calculations for the dimensions of each section multiple times. This seemed to be the most important process of the project and took up the most time and effort.