The COSMOS RET Program 2018 was a six-week summer program (July 9 to August 17). In this summer activity, 10 teachers from NYC conducted experimental research related to the COSMOS project. Through the program, the COSMOS RET teachers got familiar with fundamental technological concepts related to COSMOS research and they worked actively together with the COSMOS team on research activities, designing, orchestrating, executing, and analyzing research experiments. Since the COSMOS testbed is not yet deployed, the team executed their experiments on two remotely accessible research testbeds that are very closely related to COSMOS: The ORBIT testbed operated by Rutgers and the WITEST testbed operated by NYU. Both testbeds host technologies similar to ones that will be used in COSMOS, operate in a similar manner and use the same control and managerial framework as the COSMOS testbed.
The COSMOS RET summer program had two phases:
- Phase 1: The teachers were guided through orientation classes and lab-based experiments, in order to obtain the background needed for their involvement in research.
- Phase 2: The teachers conducted research on the COSMOS platform, along with their mentors.
Through their research projects, the teachers gained knowledge and experience on experimental research in the areas of wireless networks, cloud, and IoT. Using this experience, together with the research team jointly developed innovative real-world experiments that were organized as automated and repeatable science labs that consist educational modules. The modules run on the โCOSMOS Education Toolkitโ, a small scale COSMOS-inspired testbed that the teachers took back to their schools. With the help of the toolkit, they will be able to introduce their students to concepts from wireless networking, computer science, and physics, through hands-on, real-world research experiments.
The RET team developed as part of the COSMOS education toolkit 20 modules in math, 17 in science, and 8 in computer science.
