The recently released COSMOS education toolkit consists of the following components:
- A hardware setup: A small scale testbed with basic COSMOS components as SDR nodes, IoT nodes, monitors, etc.
- A software framework: A web based interface that allows the user to select a particular module/lab and execute the experiment and collect the results automatically via a user-friendly GUI.
- Additional educational material: Text and slides for the teacher and the student, that include background information related to the lab, directions on how to run the experiment, evaluation materials, etc.
Each module that was created by the teachers in the RET site has the following components:
- An experimental lab that is repeatable and is related to the subject to be taught.
- Educational material (text, slides) for the teacher and the student, that include background information related to the lab, directions of how to run the experiment, evaluation materials, etc.
The experiment related to a module run automatically using the toolkit’s software. The modules ware designed in a way that large scale versions of the experiments implemented for each of them will be able to run on the COSMOS testbed when it is developed. The interaction between the user and the toolkit’s hardware or eventually the COSMOS testbed is done though user-friendly GUIs that we were developed in the toolkit. The toolkit currently supports variety of modules for grades 4-12.