0ddrenaline wrote: ↑Wed Oct 27, 2021 10:56 am
mklinger wrote: ↑Wed Oct 27, 2021 9:18 am
Quick informal survey, would people have any interest in me creating a long-form video where I record myself building my latest Div C bridge design and talking through the build process? I could show the glue techniques I'm using as well as more of the general process rather than just the final result.
Thanks!
Marc
That would be helpful! A long form video would answer some questions about details that weren't addressed in other videos. One simple thing I was impressed by was the spreadsheet in your introduction video. I don't think my teams have ever been that organized with keeping track of their progress and design choices. A video on this topic might be good if you're taking suggestions. I'll definitely show your videos to my students and make sure we use the information in practice
Thanks! Yeah, a spreadsheet can be incredibly handy especially when you have the design nailed down and are to the material optimization part. It's also more important the more people are involved. This year, with no students and just me, I've been using a standard notebook to record my builds as my design has been changing a lot so far. I had originally thought about doing a couple retrospective videos on exactly how we as a team evolved for the various historic events (bridges of past, towers, boomis, etc). That would definitely feature our old spreadsheets and design tracking. I may still do that, but I wanted to first provide what I think is more direct useful info for this year's teams.
The biggest tip I can provide to help a team of students become more organized would be to provide them with a blank form on paper, basically a blank spreadsheet page, where they then fill in the specifics for every build as they build it. You can then transfer the data to a real spreadsheet to capture data from all the students. That's what I typically did.
Have them think in terms of not just component starting mass, but mass budgets for each module of the build. For example, with this year's bridge, I like to weigh the completed sides before final assembly. For something like the boomi, we kept track of the tension component completely separately from the base. This would be a good way to see if someone is using too much glue, or if something isn't right, when two students who are using the same pieces with the same mass have different module weights. It also gets the students in the habit of weighing everything and knowing exactly what is in their device.
If you know you have good results with a certain cross member design for example and are considering changing it, you need to make it lighter to make it worthwhile. That's why we tried to weigh everything as we built it. Say, the "X" members for the boomi base. Cut all the pieces and weigh them all. That is your mass budget for base cross members. If you want to try a different dimension/density/#, you cut up what you want to try and see if it's less. If not, it's not worth trying. You get to the point in the process where you can pre-pick your wood and very accurately predict the final device weight. This is especially handy near important competitions. Last year, we could pick out all the material ahead of time before cutting anything and predict the final mass within about 0.2g.
Another fun thing we did as a team throughout the years was have a friendly internal competition. We'd have a "Top 10" scores posted for all the students (and I also had a coach's Top 10 they could compete with).
A big part of this whole process is knowing what scores are possible, with any design, and what scores are possible with your current design. If you have a design that isn't progressing towards what is possible with a different design, it's time to change your design. This is usually done by watching good teams at invitationals and whenever teams share scores on the forums, etc.
Hopefully, some of what my videos show is giving teams a jump-start on seeing what is possible. I hate seeing people come to competitions with really bad designs that they've obviously spent a lot of time on!
Thank you in advance!!