Bridge design contest history and software timeline, 1998 to today

Where bridge design contest history begins: the 1998 program

Before there was a contest there was a program. In 1998 Stephen Ressler, a civil engineering professor at West Point, wrote a piece of educational software in which a student designs a steel highway truss bridge and then watches a simulated truck test it. The score was cost: the cheapest bridge that carries the truck wins.

The contest’s on-line judging and database system was the work of his brother Gene Ressler, a professor of computer science, who later rewrote the program in Java so that it could run on both Windows and Macintosh machines. Mac editions needed Java, which is where the later trouble came from.

Every later edition kept the same core idea. A student draws a truss from joints and members, picks a steel section for each member, and presses the load test. The truck crosses, members change colour to show tension and compression, and a bridge either stands or collapses. Cost then decides who wins, so a stronger bridge is not automatically a better one.

Timeline of the national bridge design contest and its software

The program was written with a competition in mind. The national contest began in the early 2000s, around West Point’s 2002 bicentennial. After that it ran annually.

Year	What happened
1998	Stephen Ressler writes the first version of the bridge design program at West Point
Early 2000s	The national contest begins, linked to West Point’s 2002 bicentennial, and runs every year
2011 to 2016	One edition of the desktop software per year, each with its own release
2012	Apple drops its own Java support on the Mac; Oracle’s Java replaces it
July 2016	The American Society of Civil Engineers, the main sponsor, ends funding and the national contest is discontinued

The 2012 line is a software detail rather than a contest event, but it shaped how the later editions behaved. Macintosh editions needed Java, and after Apple’s change some Macs lost the advanced graphics used in the load-test fly-through and fell back on an older-style display. The year-by-year requirements and install sizes are set out on the page about software versions from 2011 to 2016.

The installers show the same story in megabytes. The 2011 edition was 6.1 MB on Windows and 10.2 MB on Mac. By 2015 the Windows installer was 39.8 MB and the Mac one 73.5 MB. Most of the growth came from bundling the Java runtime, a standard setup that no longer depended on whatever Java a school computer happened to have. The 2013 edition even offered a minimum setup of 9.8 MB on Windows for machines that already had Java.

The 2013 edition had a standard Windows setup of 35.6 MB with a bundled Java runtime, and Mac standard setups of 65.6 MB in 2013 and 2014. The load test leans on the graphics card in the way a game does, so a frozen or blank test window usually pointed to out-of-date graphics drivers rather than to the program. The 2012 edition measured about 9.3 MB on Windows and about 10 MB on Mac, and the 2014 edition added a 12.8 MB Mac build for machines that already had Apple’s Java installed. The early editions asked for Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7, in 32-bit or 64-bit form. The 2015 edition asked for Windows XP or newer and Mac OS X 10.7.3 (Lion) or later.

Bridge contest winners and prizes

The final round of the 2014 contest was held on 28 June 2014 at West Point. Five high school teams and three middle school teams each received two new design scenarios for the 2014 edition of the software and had two hours to develop their designs. The bridge contest winners received scholarships of $5,000 in the high school category and $1,000 in the middle school category, and all eight finalist teams were awarded VENUE 11 Pro tablet computers, donated by Dell. Before the final, 60 teams had worked on a semi-final scenario on 30 May 2014.

After July 2016: what remains of the contest

In July 2016 the American Society of Civil Engineers, the contest’s main sponsor, ended funding, and the national contest was discontinued after more than a decade of annual runs. The final desktop edition was the 2016 release, which closes the yearly run of editions in this bridge design contest history.

The classroom side of bridge design contest history did not end in 2016. A teacher can still assign one bridge site, one load and one span, then rank the class by cost, which is exactly the structure of the national contest at a smaller scale. Local and class contests of this kind carried on in classrooms after the national event stopped. Classroom contests describes how to set one up, and the teachers page places a contest inside a longer unit.

The classic desktop editions are no longer distributed, and the software status page lists the options that exist today. The official successor is ASCE Bridge Designer, Cloud Edition, free and running in a web browser.

What survives is the teaching loop: draw triangles, load them, find the weakest member, then do it again for less money. The same loop works with a pencil and a pile of craft sticks.