**5. Conclusions**

Though concept mapping has contributed to different levels of education, its construction and deployment processes require a grea<sup>t</sup> deal of study. As far as manufacturing engineering is concerned, both learning factory and human-cyber-physical systems (i.e., human and machining learning) have opened new opportunities for concept maps and brought new challenges as well. The proposed types of knowledge (analytic a priori, synthetic a priori, synthetic a posteriori, meaningful, and skeptic knowledge) can help exploit the abovementioned opportunities and tackle the challenges. This is clear from the contents presented in the previous few sections.

In order to educate students with the basic knowledge of material removal (a common topic that all manufacturing engineering students study at undergraduate degree level), a nine proposition-based concept map has been introduced. The map represents knowledge of the shear plane theory of material removal. All types of knowledge are integrated into the map, except synthetic a posteriori knowledge. The remarkable thing is that the learning process directs the learners to form new concept maps, wherein the not-yet-included type of knowledge (in this case, synthetic a posteriori knowledge) is likely to appear. This directs the whole learning process in the direction of meaningful learning.

Instead of the presented concept map, a concept map without embedding synthetic a priori knowledge can be considered for the same purpose (educating students with the basic knowledge of material removal) and can be observed whether or not the learners propose another concept map that incorporates synthetic a priori knowledge. This means that there is enough room for further investigations showing the education capability of concept maps and, thereby, meaningful learning, while offering manufacturing engineering education.

**Funding:** This research received materials and financial supports from Kitami Institute of Technology.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflicts of interest.
