In this lab exercise, my team and I were assigned to design and build a bridge out of masking tape and 36 full pieces of spaghetti noodle. The main objective however is for it to hold a single copper penny out as far away from the edge of the lab table as possible. However, my team and I had to use the engineering design process to design, build, and test the structure. During the construction phase, the team helped each other out numerous of time and we each tried to work on different parts of the bridge. After the bridge was build, we placed a penny at the edge and it arced downward. Because it arced downward, the distance that the professor measured was shorter than our expected distance. However, we didn’t just stop there. My team and I fine-tuned the bridge and…show more content… First and foremost, spaghetti blew me away in both its strength and flexibility. They are much stronger and much more willing to bend than they look. For example, when we were loading the penny, the spaghetti bridge arced all the way to the side of the table. Surprisingly, it didn’t break and just bounced back to its original shape after we remove the penny. In addition, I learned that it is much easier to plan out the small details before construction begins. In my past projects, I like to jump straight into the construction and worry about the details as I go. What I find is that the details tend to conflict with the design and is very hard to work around it. Although we had very little time to plan out our spaghetti bridge during the exercise, I still found that it still helped us during the construction phase since there was very little hiccups with the details. Finally, learned that working in groups is much very efficient during the planning phase since it is easier to keep the ideas flowing; also, during the construction phase, there are parts of the bridge where is it much easier to build when there is another person to help
