Truss Design Report
Below is the truss design report.
What I did:
For Project 2.1.8 and 2.1.9, both of which were required to complete in order to write the report, I was assigned to a group and our task was to construct a truss out of balsa wood that could withstand a large amount of force. However, the way we went about this was different between the two projects; in Project 2.1.8, our group merely constructed a pre-designed truss, while in Project 2.1.9, my group had to work cohesively to produce a truss with a high efficiency and kept within certain constraints. Once my group built the truss in 2.1.8, I was assigned to my Project 2.1.9 group, and we established group norms and wrote down contact information. After this, we began researching truss designs, brainstorming our own, and using our decision matrix, found the one best suited to the task at hand. We then built the truss and tested it.
What I learned:
I learned that theory can get you far but putting it into practice can really make all of the difference. What I mean by this is that the principles behind some things can appear to be really good but are only effective when the thing is built very closely to the theoretical model. In our case, I saw this happen when we started to build our truss - the cuts and sizes were essential, because if one thing was off, the whole truss would not work as well as predicted. We really had to be careful with the construction of the truss, but it still turned out off because of human error and other error-producing factors.
For Project 2.1.8 and 2.1.9, both of which were required to complete in order to write the report, I was assigned to a group and our task was to construct a truss out of balsa wood that could withstand a large amount of force. However, the way we went about this was different between the two projects; in Project 2.1.8, our group merely constructed a pre-designed truss, while in Project 2.1.9, my group had to work cohesively to produce a truss with a high efficiency and kept within certain constraints. Once my group built the truss in 2.1.8, I was assigned to my Project 2.1.9 group, and we established group norms and wrote down contact information. After this, we began researching truss designs, brainstorming our own, and using our decision matrix, found the one best suited to the task at hand. We then built the truss and tested it.
What I learned:
I learned that theory can get you far but putting it into practice can really make all of the difference. What I mean by this is that the principles behind some things can appear to be really good but are only effective when the thing is built very closely to the theoretical model. In our case, I saw this happen when we started to build our truss - the cuts and sizes were essential, because if one thing was off, the whole truss would not work as well as predicted. We really had to be careful with the construction of the truss, but it still turned out off because of human error and other error-producing factors.