Aims and outline of NMDB Educational project

The public for which the NMDB project develops training activities are mainly young researchers or researchers outside the field of cosmic rays who want to become familiar with cosmic rays, engineers and tudents at the university level. The training material will address people knowing 2nd or 3rd year university physics, i.e. classical mechanics and electrodynamics, elementary notions of atomic and nuclear physics, but have no knowledge of plasma physics. The material may to some extent be useful to highly motivated high school students. 

Among the topics covered by the on- line training material are primary subjects - those which are crucial for the understanding of the acceleration, propagation and detection of cosmic rays (especially those cosmic rays which are detected by neutron monitors), for their interaction with the Earth and their technological and biological impact. Our training courses will aim to be complete for these subjects, even if other web sites also partially address them. Other subjects - e.g. the context of acceleration, like solar flares, CMEs, supernova remnants - need to be treated with less detail by NMDB. We prepare a list of topics for our training activities where secondary subjects are explicitly indicated. For these topics we plan to use as many links to other sites as possible. 

Related web sites

We have  prepared a list of existing web sites and on- line resources related to training and public outreach. Most of these web- sites address public outreach below the university level. There are four sites which are useful for the university level training relevant to the present report:

• A key source of information to which NMDB can establish links is the Oulu Space Physics Textbook at: http://www.oulu.fi/~spaceweb/textbook/
  
• The University of California xspace web site has a lot of numerical examples to which we can establish links and from which we can get ideas on experiments to implement on our web site: http://www-ssc.igpp.ucla.edu/ssc/software/xspace.html
• D. Stern’s site: http://www.phy6.org/readfirst.htm has much material. Its level is high school and beginning university level, with few mathematical developments.
• The site http://www.spaceweathercenter.org/ holds attractive and instructive on-line experiments (e.g., “magneto-bowling”) which give excellent ideas about how to teach science in an amusing way