WPBD vs. K'nex

                West Point Bridge Design is a great program to help you get started when first designing bridges.  However, I feel that it is very different from using K’nex pieces to build a ‘real’ bridge.  Both WPBD and using K’nex help you to be creative, learn what works and what doesn’t and you can experiment with different sized trusses on either apparatus.

                Although West Point Bridge Design teaches you the fundamentals of bridge designing, it is a relatively easy process that involves ‘connecting the dots’.  When using K’nex, you cannot simply ‘connect the dots’.  You actually have to measure the lengths and angles of each piece you want to use and try to fit them together.  A design may work out perfectly on West Point, but it may not be possible to build using K’nex pieces.  Your design will have to be flexible to meet the restrictions of the piece lengths, widths, and angles of the ‘gusset plates’.  In West Point, you can have long rods of material that crisscross each other, but when using K’nex, you need to use smaller pieces and put a gusset plate in the middle of the intersection.  In other words, West Point is not a completely realistic design experience that conveys accurate products and results. 

                West Point Bride Design allows you to fairly easy erase something and add something somewhere else.  When using K’nex, you have to break things apart and put them back together to make your design perfect.  Another difference about the two ways to create bridges is that the weight that a bridge can hold is going to be significantly different.  K’nex pieces do not relate to real life loads and are a scaled down version.  Also, the costs of the bridges are different because each K’nex piece has a set cost and you can easily predict the cost of the bridge you are building.  West Point has so many different sizes and materials that just don’t relate to using K’nex pieces.  Overall, using K’nex pieces will be a very different experience than designing a bridge on West Point Bridge Design.
                Last week in Engineering Lab we learned a lot about how to construct research for our bridges.  Our guess speaker was very informative and helpful to the research process.  We also got to experience what it was like playing with K'nex.  We were able to use the class to experiment with the pieces and see what works best. For next week we have to design a bridge and draw a blue print of it.  We will then collaborate our designs and choose which one our team likes best.  In class we will start building our bridge.  I hope to  design a cost efficient bridge that holds a lot of weight.  I also hope that my teammates have some good ideas that we can all combine to make a really efficient bridge.