CNC Instructor's Curriculum:

CNC machining centers are among the most popular forms of CNC machinery. Almost every company that has metal cutting CNC machines has at least one.

Setup people and operators constitute the majority of CNC people in a typical CNC-using company.  A company having ten CNC machines may have but one programmer - but three setup people and twenty to thirty operators (depending upon number of shifts).  Most companies hiring CNC people are looking first and foremost for setup people and operators.  This should make it quite easy for people to find jobs once they complete your class.

This curriculum uses our proven key concepts approach, the same approach that has helped thousands of students learn CNC from our CD-rom and video courses. The Key Concepts are broken further into concise lessons. There are four Key Concepts and twelve lessons in the machining center setup and operation curriculum:

Key Concept number one: Get ready to learn about CNC machining centers
  Lesson One: Basic machining practices required for machining centers
  Lesson Two: What does a CNC machining do?

Key Concept number two: Know your machine from a setup person’s or operator’s viewpoint
  Lesson Three: General flow of CNC process
  Lesson Four: Machine configurations
  Lesson Five: Understanding the control panels
  Lesson Six: Important procedures needed to run the machine

Key Concept number three: Know the three compensation types
  Lesson Seven: Understanding compensation
  Lesson Eight: Fixture offsets and assigning program zero
  Lesson Nine: Tool length compensation
  Lesson Ten: Cutter radius compensation

Key Concept number four: Master the tasks to run a CNC machining center
  Lesson Eleven: Tasks related to making setups
  Lesson Twelve: Tasks related to completing a production run

Instructor materials for this curriculum are FREE with your initial textbook order!

Not only will you be teaching with the best state-of-the-art CNC curriculums in the industry, you’ll be doing so free of charge! All we ask is that your school bookstore buys the student manuals from us!  With an initial order of just 20 manuals, we’ll ship the instructor’s materials free of charge! All instructor materials come on the cd-rom disk (slide shows, PowerPoint Viewer, instructors manual, lessons plans manual, and Adobe Acrobat Reader to view/print the manual).  Our net price to your school (or bookstore) for student manuals is $50.00 each. Future orders can be in any quantity. This cost will be recovered, of course, as students enroll in your classes and buy the manuals. In essence, your first 20 students will be paying for the curriculum!

Other purchasing options and our return policy.

What's the difference among the various machining center curriculums?

You may have noticed that we have three different machining center curriculums - and they do overlap in the topics they cover. 

Are your students newcomers to the shop environment?

If your students have no previous shop experience (including other classes your school may offer, we recommend starting with the Machining Center Setup and Operation curriculum.  In this curriculum, we include presentations about many basic machining practice topics (shop safety, shop math, blueprint reading, tolerance interpretation, and measuring devices).  Once this curriculum is completed, then use the Machining center programming curriculum.

Do students have shop experience?

It is possible that your students already have some shop experience (they understand shop safety, shop math, blueprint reading, tolerance interpretation, and measuring devices).  They may have learned these topics in other classes from your school. 

In this case, and assuming that you want to teach all three tasks a person must master in order to become proficient with CNC (programming, setup, and operation), we recommend that you use the Machining Center Programming, Setup and Operation curriculum.  If you want to teach only setup and operation, use the Machining Center Setup and Operation curriculum.  If you want to teach only programming, use the Machining Center Programming curriculum.

Instructor's materials:

Instructor manual

We include one hard copy of this manual with the curriculum and it is also included on disk one in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format so you can print additional copies. This manual includes:

• Getting started – An introduction to the curriculum, including factors that contribute to a good learning environment, the key concepts approach, lesson structure, a description of the student and instructor materials, and a list of things you still need to use this curriculum.
• Putting it all together – a set of recommendations for teaching with this curriculum.
• Hard copy of review slide show – Helps you prepare to review information as you get deeper into the course.  It also provides and excellent outline for the course
• Answers to exercises – Answers to the exercises in the student manual.

Lesson plans manual

This concise manual contains one sheet per Key Concept and one sheet per lesson (32 pages total). Each sheet provides information to help you get ready to teach:

• Lesson name
• Lesson number
• Approximate time needed to present the lesson
• Presentation links slide from the slide show (list of topics)
• Lesson objective
• Key points to make for each topic
• Suggestions for what to do at the machine to stress the points made in the lesson
• Suggestions for a lab exercise (if appropriate)
• Suggested homework assignment
• Suggestions for exercises to be done

CD-rom disk

All instructor’s materials are included on two CD-rom disks, including:

• Slide presentations – These slide shows provide the visuals for your course.  See below for more information about them.  As a sample, here is the slide show for lesson one of the curriculum.
• PowerPoint Viewer – Allows you to view/display the slide shows, but we strongly recommend that you have the actual PowerPoint software (not just the viewer) so you can edit the slide shows.

About the PowerPoint slide presentations

PowerPoint is the presentation software of choice for most presenters. Presentations in this curriculum total over 1,200 slides, providing the visuals for the course. Every step along the way, there's a highly colorful graphic or animation to help you make your points! Every lesson (12 total) includes a slide show to provide the visuals you need to teach. They are all computer generated graphics and animations that really help you make your points during the class.

Lesson topics slide - We’ve made each lesson very interactive. We have included - in each lesson - a special links slide. This lets you start/continue your presentation at the start of any major topic in the lesson. Each underlined topic on the presentation links slide is a text link that, if clicked, will send the presentation to the chosen topic within the lesson. To get back to the presentation links page, simply click the return button in the lower left corner of any slide. The lesson topics slide is always the very first slide for the lesson, making it easy to spot. If you want to present the lesson in its entirety, simply skip this slide (use the slide advance key). If class time ends before you finish a lesson, this slide should make it easy to continue in your next session.

Or, as you’re preparing to teach, you may decide not to include certain topics in your presentation. Perhaps you want to skip them for now and come back to them later. In this case, when you get to the topic you wish to skip, simply click on the return button to get back to the lesson topics slide. Then click on the topic after the one you wish to skip. Note that when you click on a topic, PowerPoint will jump to the slide beginning the topic you’ve chosen and continues from there. It will not return to the lesson topics slide unless you click the return button. This slide will also make it much easier to review. It makes a great set of bullet points, helping you remember the topics that must be reviewed. If students are having problems with a topic during the review, you can simply click on the topic and present the material again. In fact, presentation links slides are identical to the slides in the review.ppt slide presentation.

Fly-in text boxes- Regardless of how much preparation you do, it will be impossible to memorize every presentation included in this lengthy curriculum. Again, there are over 1,200 slides. It can be especially difficult during transition points, when the presentation is shifting gears. If you don’t know what’s coming up (as you’re teaching), you can look ill-prepared in front of your students. For this reason, transition slides include fly-in text boxes to help you stay on track. Each fly-in text box will automatically fly in as soon as this slide is displayed.  Sometimes the fly-in text box will keep you from forgetting to make a key point. Other times it will help at a transition point to remind you about where the presentation is going. In many cases, what is in the text box can be used as your first sentence for the slide, helping you quickly dig into the material.

"Review" slide presentation - We cannot stress enough the importance of reviewing information you have presented earlier in the class. In the review slide presentation, we begin each key concept with the key concept name and a list of lessons related to the key concept. This lets you re-stress the importance of each key concept. We then include a slide for each lesson in the key concept with bullet points to help you remember the topics that need reviewing. Actually, these bullet point slides are identical to the lesson topics slide (discussed earlier) in each lesson, except they are all together in one handy presentation. If students are having problems with a topic, you can quickly call up the lesson’s presentation and go to the presentation links page. Then click on the topic to present it again. A hard copy of the this presentation is included in the Instructor manual.

Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer - Though we highly recommend that you have the actual PowerPoint software, we do include the PowerPoint Viewer. It does allow you to display the slide shows, but you’ll have no way to modify them. Additionally, the slide shows are quite long (most over 100 slides). PowerPoint Viewer does not allow you to move around in the slide show nearly as easily as the actual PowerPoint software does.

Free phone assistance

Admittedly, there’s a lot of information in this curriculum. If you have questions about any topic while your preparing to teach the course, we welcome your phone calls (847-639-8847). Or email us at lynch@cncci.com.

Student's materials:

Student manual

This comprehensive (284 page) Machining Center Setup and Operation manual follows the slide presentations to the letter (in fact each lesson plan slide includes the page number in the manual that the lesson begins), and will make excellent reading material during the class - possibly homework reading assignments. It will also make a great reference book for students long after the class is over. It is extremely tutorial and very easy to understand. 

Quizzes and exercises are included right in the student manual.  Answers to quizzes are shown right after the quiz.  Answers to the exercises are provided at the end of the text.  If you want to grade students' work (you don't want them to have access to the answers), you can simply ask them to remove the exercise answers on the first day of class.

What you'll still need

In order to show the PowerPoint slide presentations to a group of people, you need the following items.

A Windows computer - Any current model Windows computer will work. If using a desktop computer, you can easily watch the monitor of the computer (facing your audience) to see the slide show as slides are displayed behind you by the projection system. Since the left mouse button advances the slides, you even have a remote slide advance button (as is commonly used with a 35 mm slide projector). If portability is an issue, keep in mind that many of the notebooks and sub-notebooks have ample power to run the presentation software. However, be careful in your selection. Many notebooks do not allow you to send data out through the VGA port and see the slide show on the LCD screen of the notebook at the same time. Without this ability, you may have to turn around to see your slides, which can be distracting to your audience.

Microsoft PowerPoint Software (PowerPoint 2000 was used to create the slide show) - Though you can display all presentations with PowerPoint Viewer (included with this curriculum), you will need Microsoft PowerPoint if you intend to modify the slide shows given in this curriculum. We highly recommend that you have this ability. This software can be found in any computer store for a price of about $250.00 (it also comes with Microsoft Office). You will find this to be a very powerful presentation generating program; one you can use to develop your own slide shows for other courses (or of course, modify those in this course curriculum).

A way of displaying the slide shows - You have several alternatives in this regard. All involve using a device that takes data from the VGA port of your personal computer. First, many schools already have a projection system that can display information from a personal computer. Basically, anything that can be shown on the computer screen can be displayed through the projection system. Second, you can use a device that sits on top of an overhead projector to display your screen shows. In essence, this device makes a transparency of what ever is on the display screen of the computer. Third, and especially if price is a concern, you can use a simple scan converter (about $200.00 - $300.00) and display your screen show on any television that has a video in connector (as most do). If you must use the RF connector of the television (where an antenna plugs in), an RF converter must be purchased. Since there are so many alternatives for displaying your slide shows, we welcome phone calls (847) 639-8847 if you have questions about your alternatives.