The Engineering Pathway Portal to the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) brings together quality engineering education materials from all over the internet allowing teachers to search thousands of resources in a single location. Each month during the school year in the Pre-Engineering Times, the Engineering Pathway will highlight one or more engineering activities available from the collection related to the months theme.

The activity for this month is Manufacturing Technologies: Making a Picture Frame, simulates work in a factory so students may experience first-hand the basic steps of the designing a manufacturing process. Cutting, shaping, assembly, joining, and finishing are the methods used by manufacturing engineers to ensure quality, safety, and quantity. The goal of this activity is to demonstrate the basic processes involved in a manufacturing system while producing your own picture frame. These processes must be specified in order for a manufacturing process to be automated. This activity comes from the TeachEngineering Digital Library, the K-12 partner in the Engineering Pathway.

Another resource called Press 7 on the Engineering Pathway provides software that simulates the manufacturing processes within a plastics factory. The simulation models a plastics factory and allows the student to act as automation engineers by looking at the state of the process at various points throughout. The student has the ability to make changes and redesign the process in order to improve it. The student then can see the results of his/her changes. The downloadable software, Press 7 Simulation, runs on Windows and is linked from the Engineering Pathway.