For the rest of the first week of university, the staff had decided to split the 3Ddesign department into 5 groups, in hopes that we would interact and get to know other students that were doing a different course. We were then given the task of constructing a bridge that would spand over a 3metre gap without any support touching the ground or any wieghts that held the two ends of the bridge down. The materials that were given to us were 3 10cm pipes, 6m fishing wire, 1m30cm cardboard, and a smaller lengthed cardboard, and a sheet of foam board, with a hand full of paper clips.
In my group we decided to just start generating our own design ideas the first day, then we got together the next day to present them to the group. After the presentation of everyones ideas we chose one that looked like the best design and had started to improve on it by figuring out its weaknesses and adjusting the design to solve the issues. We also made a scaled models that were 1metre long and tested the strength of them with wieghts to determine further if the design required any further alterations.
(My own design ideas for the bridge.)
Once we had tackled the designing stage of the project we then started making the actual bridge itself, with the material that were given to us.
(Construction of the bridge.)
Construction of the bridge took about 2days, and at the end of those days we had produced a bridge with a suspension mechanism that was made from the fishing wire and having two vertical triangles one at each end of the bridge.
Friday came and it was time to test the bridges, we walked out onto the Race Course carrying out our bridges to a location where there were 2 podiums set up as well as a stack of wieghts. During the testing stage, our bridge faired pretty well seeing that my group had thought that it wasn't even going to hold 1kg, which in the end it had actually held 1.7kg.