Harvard Model Bridge Testing! Trusses and Beams

Learning by Doing! When I was teaching Structures II at Harvard’s GSD, we decided to do a bridge competition where the students design and build bridges with limited materials to span approx 10ft (3m). We gave three prizes (all of equal value): 1) Best looking bridge as voted by the whole class (before testing took place). 2) The bridge that could carry the heaviest load. 3) The bridge that could carry the heaviest load per self-weight of bridge itself. Each team loaded their own bridge until failure. They also had a related report assignment which was in two parts: 1) Before testing: Why this design, how they expected it would fail, and under how much load. 2) After testing: How their bridge actually failed, how and why (if) that was different to what they expected, and what they would do differently to improve it. Thanks to Andrew Gipe for pushing the concept, to the TAs Andrew Gipe, Alex Karadjian, Dimitris Venizelos, and Wen Wen. Also to the GSD Fab Lab Burton LeGeyt and Rachel Vroman and to Juhun Lee for video editing. Most of all thank you to the students for an awesome set of work! You can find the full video of the tests without commentary here: I’m Paul Kassabian. I’m a structural engineer and a Principal at SGH in Boston, MA. I taught graduate students at MIT for nine years and currently teach on/off at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD). These are videos based on my structural design projects and years of teaching structures to students.