Knex review - Hudson

Looking back over my post from last week I agree with everything I wrote. Working with knex more made me realize how much more they need a larger variety of pieces at different angles. Some things are just not possible with knex and that makes no sense when you're trying to make a scale model of a bridge you want to build.

The knex also break in strange ways that the bridges can't actually break. Pieces of bridges won't just slip out of the joints, which is one major project with knex. A real bridge might not break in those places. Bridges made out of knex also flex together and apart which real bridges wouldn't do. Overall it's still a really good medium to work with your hands when you're modeling your bridge, like I said in my last post.

I think the difference between knex and designing a real bridge would be the ways the bridges break and how they can be constructed, along with the materials, like I said last week. The materials only come one way with knex, which makes it difficult to judge how weak you can get a certain beam before it breaks. Steal is also a lot less flexible than the plastic knex so they aren't entirely accurate when it comes to how the bridge behaves under stress, much like the WPBD software overexaggeration of how the bridge would bend.

Building a real bridge out of steel would be a lot more realistic, even if you were just making a scale model. You could weld the pieces together and do tests on them that would work better since you're making it out of the same materials that you're making the bridge out of, though you can't just snap the pieces apart if you do that. You have to be fairly certain of your design before you start to construct it, so it requires a lot more initial planning.

For this week I hope to see the ways in which our bridge breaks and improve on it from there. We can also get a base model for the strength vs cost ratio that our final design might follow.

For next week I want to improve on our bridge and make it stronger, while also understanding how knex interact with each other so we can try to fix how they go together. That might stop the beams from sliding out of the grooves or we could make the design better so that it isn't even a possibility that the beams slip out.