In February 2023 we wrapped up the CNC-PROG project – the Summer School of CNC Machine Programming, financed by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA). Now that the dust has settled and we have had time to sort through hundreds of photos, it is a good moment to sum up what actually happened.
The short version: 40 students and doctoral candidates from Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Turkey and Ukraine came to Lublin to learn how to program CNC machine tools. The longer version is below.
Why a summer school?
Anyone who has followed the job market in recent years knows that CNC programmers and operators are in short supply, in Poland and pretty much everywhere else in Europe. Our university has been teaching CNC programming to Polish students for years, but until now there was no course of this kind open to participants from abroad. CNC-PROG was meant to change that, and it did.
We designed a completely new intensive course – 40 hours, taught in English, run in a blended formula. Five editions of training took place in summer of 2022, each with a small groups of eight participants. Small groups were a deliberate choice. When someone is standing at a machine for the first time, they need an instructor next to them, not a lecture hall.
How the course worked
Each edition began with three days of online classes: the basics of programming in the Heidenhain environment, work modes, file management, linear and circular interpolation, subprograms, machining cycles, coordinate transformations. Dry material, admittedly, but necessary.
After a weekend break the participants came to Lublin for the practical part, held at the Centre for Innovation and Advanced Technologies. Two full days at the machines: mounting tools, measuring tool offsets with a probe, setting the workpiece zero point, running their own programs and finally measuring whether the finished part came out as intended. Sometimes it did not, which is arguably when people learn the most.
Before the first edition even started, our instructors went through their own training – a course at the DMG MORI centre in Germany, plus an intensive technical English course at the university's language centre. We wanted the level of teaching to hold up internationally, not just on paper.
Not only machining
The participants spent their free time getting to know Lublin, and we did our best to show them around. For most of them it was their first visit to Poland. The photos in this post speak for themselves – there was a lot of good energy in these groups, and quite a few contacts made during the school have survived the project itself.
Everyone who completed the course received a certificate confirming the skills they had acquired. Given how the market looks, we suspect those certificates will not gather dust.
What stays with us
Apart from the memories, the project left behind a full set of teaching materials: a syllabus with ECTS credits, presentations, printed instructions and a series of instructional videos recorded at our machines. These materials are already being used in regular teaching at the university and will serve as the basis for future international courses.
In fact, that future has already begun. The experience gained in CNC-PROG is now being put to work in our second NAWA-funded project – MISIO (Młodzi Innowatorzy Systemów Inteligentnej Obróbki – Young Innovators of Intelligent Machining Systems), which is currently underway. Everything we learned here, from recruitment and course organisation to teaching international groups at the machines, feeds directly into it.
Thank you to everyone who took part – participants, instructors and the whole project team. See you at the next one.
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