The vibe in visiting assistant professor Naser Haghbin, PhD’s “Engineering Statics” class was anything but static as students ambled into the School of Engineering’s mechanics lab on a November afternoon.

The sophomore mechanical engineering students had spent the semester learning and analyzing theories of truss bridge construction – using triangular systems of diagonal bars to create a load-bearing structure, based on the principle that a triangle cannot be distorted by stress. Using the lab’s 3D Makerbot printers, they had worked in teams to design and create the strongest possible truss bridge prototypes.

Now it was time to assess the load-bearing capacity of each team’s bridge, determined by first weighing the 3D-printed project and then testing it in the lab’s Structural Stress Analyzer 1000 machine, set to a maximum force of 500 lbs.