Truss Me!
Experience one of the top-rated Free games on the App Store, Truss Me!! Developed by the innovative team at SCIENTIFIC MONKEY LLC, this Education game provides a unique gaming experience like no other. With a content rating of 4+, it’s perfect for a wide range of players. Since its initial release on 2nd November 2013, the game has seen numerous updates, with the latest version launched on 1st June 2016.
Are you a fan of Education, Puzzle, games? Then Truss Me! is right up your alley! You won’t be able to resist its appeal.
User Ratings of Truss Me!
Over 22 players have rated Truss Me!. Join them and share your thoughts!
How Much Does Truss Me! Cost?
Good news! You can download Truss Me! on your iOS device absolutely free!
Truss Me! Release Date
Eager to know when Truss Me! first graced the App Store? It was launched on 2nd November 2013.
When Was Truss Me! Last Updated?
The latest version of Truss Me! was updated on 1st June 2016, ensuring a more enjoyable gaming experience for all players.
Where Can I Download Truss Me!?
To get started with Truss Me!, head over to the official Apple App Store.
A Glimpse into Truss Me!
Designed by a true rocket scientist, Truss Me helps you learn to design structures while having fun! At each challenge, design structures that are light and strong and you will earn precious golden nuts.
Truss Me utilizes state of the art simulation techniques used by aerospace, mechanical, and civil engineers to provide the most realistic behavior for your structures. If well designed, your structures will resist as they would in real life*. If your design has flaws, the structure will fail realistically*!
*Truss Me has been created for educational and recreational purposes only. It must not be used under any circumstances to design or compute real structures.
What’s New in the Latest Update?
Find out what’s new in the latest version of Truss Me! updated on 1st June 2016:
This app has been updated by Apple to display the Apple Watch app icon.
Various bug fixes.
User Reviews on Truss Me!
Looking for more information? Read a comprehensive review of Truss Me! below:
This game is serious fun, and we mean that very literally. It’s a great idea, it’s loads of fun, the 3-star scoring adds replay value, AND it’s a seriously great tool for teaching the basics of truss design. If you’re embarking on the design of an epic toothpick or dried spaghetti structure, start here! This is the most fun we’ve had since Cat Physics, the best iPhone game ever. However, after the third level the frustration exceeded the fun. This game DESPERATELY needs snap: Snap to mid-point of rod, snap to straight, 90 (30, 60, 45) degrees, vertical, horizontal, etc.. It’s very frustrating trying to slide a node along a rod, looking for the mid-point, trying to keep the rod straight, getting no feedback, and not being able to see what we’re doing because it’s all happening underneath our fingertip (#iphone_needs_stylus!). It stops being about truss design and becomes a fight with the user interface. That’s not fun, or educational. Also, at some zoom levels it’s impossible to straighten a rod with a node in the (approximate) middle of it. Snap would fix that. If we were making a wish list I’d include continuous coordinate/angle readout as we move nodes, and some easy way to make a structure symmetrical. Word balloons when you tap a control, identifying that control, would speed up the learning curve. We really hope this app continues to be developed, because we’re eager to get back to playing it, but without the frustration.
We were going to use this with our second graders but there are no directions. Add them please!
A really great tool for structural design. By the way, this is not a "game". We use the Truss us tool to evaluate and compare different truss models. But we’re disappointed that we cannot save any work and, worse, if our iPhone goes to sleep, then all our work disappears.
Simply adding 0-3 "gold nut" ratings as a "scoring" mechanism doesn’t make something a game. Let’s break this thing down: 1) No instructions. Period. 2) Any kind of GOAL for each stage. First stage? We got 3 gold nuggets! Second stage? One. WHY? Who knows! We used the minimum possible struts with the minimum possible widths. What was we supposed to do? Oh, we got it… Delete this.
Look at the moon landing, level 14. Where are the requirements? You supply no directions, no explanations of devices that are added to the structure, no required goal………. This could be easily added as a main menu. You were asked for this over 2 years ago.
Hey! Us and our cousin met u at Georgia tech and u took a picture of us and u said we were the first to beat ur game and we loved ur game! KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK.
This app is fantastic! It not only computes the behavior of trusses but also provides great visual feedback. For example, you can visualize both the deformation of the structure and the stresses on the bars. No other app we are aware of shows stresses, which are crucial for understanding the difference between tension and compression. In this app blue means compression, and you can easily see how compressed bars buckle! The gaming aspect makes it even more interesting. Love learning while having the motivation to beat an extra level!
The developer has put a lot of effort into polishing this app since we first played it. We like the constant updates and the tendency of the app developer to stick to real physics. It is one of the few games where real world physics is preferred over special effects and that is the beauty of it.
When you start playing it asks permission to access your camera. We found it weird but allowed it. Game wasn’t user friendly and we didn’t see reason why it would need our camera at all for this game. No positives. Deleted asap.
Complicated app. No learning mode. No explanation why one solution is better than another to raise your score. To make matters worse it asked for access to the camera for no reason and with no explanation. That raises a red flag.
We haven’t enjoyed a game as much in awhile – it’s good smart fun and you learn about efficient load bearing – win win!
Just can’t seem to make any structure that can stand on it’s own under it’s own weight. Even a small triangle collapses. What is the material? Clay? Jello? Slurpee straws? That aside, we think it’s a great idea. It will be awesome once it’s fixed.
We love apps like this but for the money it should have more levels. Would give it 5 but its simply too short for me.
This app has a lot of potential. Today it has almost no help or instructions. You "solve it" but get few points. That implies a more elegant solution must exist. It claims to teach you but without some suggestions it only leaves you frustrated. So why do we keep playing it? It is fun we guess.
As a mechanical engineer, we find their physics engine to be quite lackluster. Unless, of course, the bridges are being built with rubber, since their tensile load seems to be about 10x their compression load. Maybe they’re just cables, so they can’t support a compression load at all. Who knows.
We want our money back. Very dull, crashes regularly and online support is gone.
We loved the first version, and this one adds some very nice features to make the game even more challenging and complete. Recommended!!! Update: now it’s even available for the iPhone!!! It’s definitely on the list of our must have apps!!! Great, great job!! Update: undo and redo buttons are a killer features! Well done!
We really like this app. It’s fun and challenging. But, there is no guidance. After you walk through the initial instructions, you never get any more feedback. I’d love to understand trusses more. But, we’re just left to figure out each on on our own. We have passed all 15 levels, but many with one star. We wish there was a companion web tutorial or even a suggestion of where to look for more information.
Picture a square structure, only 2 major gridlines in dimension, with 2 cross-bracing members. Now picture both cross-bracing members and both vertical members buckling… This might happen with a very flexible and heavy metal (not Metallica) but not with any type of material containing the properties necessary for structural integrity. Please don’t make the same mistake we did and pay for this app.
We have a new appreciation for bridges.
Very well done! Contrary to the previous reviewer’s thoughts, a thorough help menu makes coming up to speed on use extremely easy. The level of detail in the failure mechanisms being modeled makes this a fine educational engineering experience.
We love this app. The engineering in the belly of the machine is extraordinary, and the challenges are a lot of fun and addictive. Helps build great intuition and creativity. We’re an engineer with several years of experience and this app, in addition to being very enjoyable, is getting us to think about structures in new ways. On the downside… Our girlfriend who is a humanities major, has gotten into this app and is outdoing us on the challenges! We don’t how she thinks of and comes up her structures, but it’s wonderful to see this that the app is also fun for someone with no technical background, and that creativity even in technical matters is not restricted to technical folks.
This is a great app: educational, entertaining and very realistic! We feel we learn a lot about structures while playing. To@Meched: we noticed the same and then we realized you need to have nodes first if you want to add elements! Then everything works smoothly. It would be great to have this explained in the help section. Other than that, good job!!! Pedro MDP.
We feel that we do a have a structural Lab in our phone! It is awesome, in the sense that you can create ANY arbitrary configuration of truss structures, add weights, and see how the structure deforms! Investigate stabilities, failures. It is simply fantastic! We wish we had it when we were learning the statics!
Mechanics is pretty realistic. Columns buckle unless they are stiffened. Beams under tension can take a lot of load, but eventually will stretch if overloaded. The problems to solve are a bit limited. We wish the developer would add more levels, and provide the ability to zoom in/out, so that bigger & more elaborate constructions could be made.
We love how this app lets us play around with structural elements and then immediately see which members are in tension and compression. After awhile we start to get an intuitive feel for how to build an optimized structure. If we were teaching statics we would make this a required exercise. A few suggestions: Please add a multiple undo/redo feature. We find myself growing tired of repeating actions after a failed experiment. Allow us to save and recall structure diagrams. We many cases we spent quite awhile figuring out a solution and it would be nice to show someone what we came up with. It would also be useful when comparing different solutions. Make it easier to switch between deleting and adding elements. Maybe a different gesture to remove an item rather than selecting a different tool.
We generally see promise in any app related to technology and engineering, and we saw it here too in a concept to bring a structural design app to the iPad. But, this one misses the mark. This app seems to try to make a truss structure game too much like Angry Birds in how it scores at the expense of basic understanding of how some of the elements work. We realize there are general explanations in the Help section, but the help should be more prominent and there once you are in the interface. It also lacks certain seemingly obvious user interface elements such as an undo button and a tap to take you to the next challenge once youve completed the current one. Finally, especially for a younger inexperienced audience, it would be helpful for each challenge level to actually state what exactly the challenge is. It took us, an experienced iPad user, and someone that has used software like this to some amateur extent, way too long to figure out how to manipulate things in the build area. For now, stick to the desktop/laptop and web versions of this type of software.
Adding members doesn’t work. We’re sure there is a way to do that, but it isn’t obvious. Cool concept, but not ready for prime time.
Great fun but so many product ideas come to mind for enhancements. We hope the authors are planning to add things like the ability to control natural damping, and springs, or even the ability to save your bits so you can re-use them in a bigger item.. In fact a bigger field would be nice.. Ill give it good points for a new and growing product. Keep up the good work.
This app is pretty awesome. We bought it a few weeks ago and have been working our way through it. This app is great for developing a fundamental intuition about how truss structures work, how stresses are distribute through a truss, and where compression and tension occur during loading. This would be a great supplement to any beginning engineers education. The levels get increasingly more difficult. This app would be invaluable for a beginning engineer.
We are an aerospace engineering student at a rigorous university in the United States. We take pride in studying hard and learning the material in traditional ways, but we would also highly encourage teachers and college professors to introduce this type of technology (of which TrussMe! Is a prime example) into their teaching methodology. As many of you well know, the first few years of undergraduate education are meant to solidify the fundamentals and develop the students’ intuition to solve more complex problems in their upper level courses and professional careers. Often, for the majority of students, structural labs are the first exposure to experimental, constraint-driven, design-minded challenges. This app is an excellent way to anticipate and smooth out that transition from textbook problems to the machine shop, as well as an inexpensive solution to their early sketches, analysis validation, and virtual prototypes. On a side note, we got this app for our dad for Christmas too. He’s never had an opportunity to attend college like us, but he’s the tinkerer-type… He absolutely loved TrussMe! And man, what an intuition he already has!
Students in mechanics need to obtain an engineering sense of the mathematics and physics. This app is a revolutionary way for them to understand the concepts. It is invaluable for engineering students, and it is an excellent tool for high school students to see the application of the maths and physics. We give it our highest recommendation!
A pleasant surprise. It kept us busy for quite a while.
Being a mechanical kind of guy we were immediately drawn into this app. We couldn’t put it down. Great fun and educational. Great job. Keep the updates coming.
This is an awesome program for learning about the design of truss structures. Really fun to play.