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As the information technologies bring about profound changes in educational environment, education informatization is becoming an inevitable trend of education reform movement. Higher education was undergoing a profound transformation of educational cognitive systems, and educational mode has gradually shifted from traditional classroom teaching into network, television and other multimedia teaching to improve learning motivation and effectiveness (Lee et al., 2015). With the improving progress of numerical control (NC) technology, NC machine tools have been widely used in the field of the mechanical processing industries, and many companies are in great need of NC technical personnel, in which case some NC technology courses have been set up in the mechanical engineering specialty of most colleges and universities (Yao et al., 2007). NC machining course is an undergraduate course in the authors' university. It is because NC teaching needs great theoretical depth and practicality that students find it difficult to learn it well. Moreover, it is hard to attract the students' attention by simple monolithic explanation in class and well achieve the instructional objectives. Therefore, it is of great value for us to find the suitable teaching method. With this in mind, several attempts have been made to find new educational approaches to enhance students’ learning motivation.
Virtual simulation technology has become one of the most popular technologies in the field of engineering education after the multimedia information technology in recent years. With the emergence of virtual learning environments in the educational context, the teaching modes are undergoing transformations (Gonzalez et al., 2017). The responsibilities of teachers are to stimulate students' learning interests, carry out the effective teaching strategies to cultivate students' creative thinking, and promote students' intellectual development. It is generally admitted that the application of simulation technology in education has brought about profound teaching reform, which will surely have impact on the traditional teaching mode.
The development and popularity of simulation technology has created enormous opportunities and challenges for education. The simulation technology shifts students from passively accepting knowledge to actively participate in education. Students will participate in machining operation, discover new knowledge positively in this process and internalize the knowledge. Therefore, by using the simulation technology in NC teaching courses, the suitable modular construction creates a vivid, open and original virtual learning environment for students. Thus, the students can not only acquire the knowledge, but also take the initiative to explore and master the methods of constructing the knowledge, which is propitious to cultivate the students' innovation ability (Wang et al., 2007).
The manufacturing community is in constant pursuit of improving the research in the field of NC machining process. Simulation in manufacture systems is a very important decision-making tool for improving system flow with the help of simulating the existing systems’ manufacture process (Mehmet et al., 2011). Virtual machining, based-on the model of a machining system, aims to simulate, evaluate and optimize the actual machining process with high sense of reality (Li et al., 2008). In this way, NC machining simulation has recently become essential to execute NC programs safely in an unmanned mode and to guarantee a high quality of machining (product accuracy and machining efficiency). This makes it possible to reduce the product development lead times and costs by correcting all the potential errors before the real machining of the part (Blasquez et al., 2004).