Week 4 Blog Post

            Westpoint Bridge Design has many positives and negatives.  I think the overall concept of the program does a lot to teach you about bridges.  It teaches you about what geometric shapes work best and what does not work.  One of my favorite parts of the program is that it shows you the cost of the bridge you have built.  I think this is really cool because you learn not to put extra materials into your bridge.  What Westpoint Bridge Design does really well is calculate forces that act on the bridge.  On the right hand side of the screen the program gives you calculated forces.  Unfortunately I feel like while the program teaches you a lot it is not very realistic.  In real life a bridge would not bend as much as this program portrays.  The program does not account for out side forces excluding the truck that crosses.  Other forces that should be accounted for are weather, wear and tare over time, and other vehicles that might cross.  Just because a bridge passes a weight test does not make it safe.

            Last week we saw the bridge that had the lowest cost.  This cost was around 220,00 dollars.  The bridge that I submitted cost around 280,000 dollars.  The class discussed what the definition of the perfect bridge was.  The definition we came up with was the cheapest bridge that can withstand the most amount of weight.  After our class discussion we broke up into our smaller groups to try and make the cheapest bridge.  Our group got our bridge down to about 250,000 dollars but this was still not as cheap as the cheapest in the class.  During the following week our group has continued to get our price down but not significantly.  Once we start working with Knex our group plans on meeting more frequently to work on the bridge design.  

-John Watson