CNC Instructor's Curriculum:

CNC turning centers are among the most popular forms of CNC machinery. Almost every company that has metal cutting CNC machines has at least one. This newly updated curriculum allows you to present a complete course for this very common machine type.

This curriculum uses our proven key concepts approach, the same approach that has helped thousands of students learn CNC from our video courses. As with our video courses and CD-rom courses, the key concepts are broken further into concise lessons. There are 28 lessons in the turning center curriculum.

This curriculum is 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 (slide shows, PowerPoint Viewer, instructors manual, and Adobe Acrobat Reader to view/print the manual) come on the cd-rom disks. Our net price to your school (or bookstore) for manuals is $60.00 each for the student manual and $19.95 each for each workbook (totaling $79.95 per set). 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.

Instructor materials

For The 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.
• Course outline – The entire course in outline format. Includes key concept names, lesson names, topics in each lesson, and approximate slide numbers.
• Answer book – Answers to the exercises and programming activities in the workbook (it’s a workbook with answers filled in).
• Final test with answers – Your way to confirm that students understand major points in the entire course.

Lesson Plans manual

This concise manual contains one sheet per Key Concept and one sheet per lesson (39 sheets, 78 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 if you are teaching only setup and/or operation (not programming)
• 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 one CD-rom disk, including:

• Slide presentations with guidance – This set of slide shows (one for each lesson) includes audio guidance on selected slides (played by clicking a special icon) to help you understand how to make presentations during the course.
• Slide presentations without guidance – Since the slide shows with audio guidance are very large files, we provide another set of slides shows without the guidance that will load much quicker. We recommend using this set of slide shows as you actually teach to minimize distracting file loading time.
• Written documentation - All written documentation (contents of the To The Instructor manual and the Instructor Notes manual) are also included on the CD-rom disks so you can print additional copies if you wish. There is a lot of information to print, however (the Instructor Notes manual is over 800 pages), so we can also supply additional copies at an additional charge of $75.00 per set.
• Adobe Acrobat Reader – Allows you to view/print the written documentation.
• 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 fast becoming the presentation software of choice by most presenters. Presentations in the machining center curriculum total over 5,000 slides and provide the visuals for the course. Every step along the way, there's a highly colorful graphic or animation to help you make your points! Each lesson 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.

Slide shows with and without audio guidance - To help you prepare to teach, we provide one set of slide shows with audio guidance. On selected slides, you'll find an instructor icon that, if clicked, will activate an audio narration that tells you what our intentions are at this point in the course. Note that this audio guidance is not intended for students. It's aimed at instructors that will be teaching the course. Note that some of the slide shows with guidance are very long and will take some time to load. For this reason, we also provide another (identical) set of slide shows without guidance. You can use them to minimize loading time while actually teaching the course. Note that all presentation files are aptly named. In the folder named Slide presentations without guidance, you'll find files named Lesson1.ppt through lesson28.ppt. In the folder named Slide presentations with guidance, you'll also find files named lesson1g.ppt through lesson28.ppt, but there will be no audio guidance with these presentations.

Presentation links slide - We’ve made each lesson more interactive. Instead of having to find the slide that begins each topic on your own, we’ve added a special links slide in each lesson. This lets you start/continue your presentation at the start of any major topic in the lesson. (Download the sample of the turning center curriculum slide show to see an example of the presentation links slide.) 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 presentation links slide is always located in the same place – right after the lesson plan (about 10-15 slides into the lesson). 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.

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 presentation links page. 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 presentation links 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 7,200 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, most slides now 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. (Download the sample of the turning center curriculum slide show to see an examples of fly-in text boxes.) 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 presentation links 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 For 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 300 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 (393 page) Turning Center Programming and Operation manual is the same manual we supply with our machining center CD-rom course and video course. It 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.

Student workbook

Though you may elect to develop your own practice activities, this ready-made workbook includes twenty-four exercises, one for each lesson in the course. Exercises include true/false, multiple choice, and fill-in-the-blanks questions and make great quizzes or homework assignments. About half of the exercises also include realistic programming activities. Download samples of the written materials for this curriculum to see examples of the answer book (the workbook with filled in answers).

What you'll still need

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

A computer with Windows 95 (or higher) - 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 screen show - 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.