cosmos classroom

Inspiration

I was always a curious child, and I understood things best when I could picture them in my head. My father was a physics teacher, so he often helped me turn difficult ideas into something visual. Still, diagrams in textbooks could only go so far. I wanted to move around a solar system, watch an orbit change, and see what happened when I changed a value in an equation. For years, I did not have a practical way to build that experience on my own computer. With tools like Codex and GPT-5.6, I was finally able to turn that childhood curiosity into something real. Cosmos Classroom is the learning tool I wish I had when I was younger.

What it does

Cosmos Classroom is an interactive 3D science lab where students can explore concepts instead of only reading about them. Users can travel through a simulated solar system, inspect planets and other bodies, change physical parameters, and immediately see how those changes affect motion, gravity, energy, and orbits. It also includes guided classroom missions, AP Physics experiments, a chemistry reaction bench, scientific explanations, and Nova, an AI tutor that can help students understand what is happening inside a simulation. The goal is simple: make science feel less like memorizing equations and more like experimenting with the universe.

How we built it

I built Cosmos Classroom as a browser-based application using React, TypeScript, Three.js, and Zustand. Three.js powers the 3D environments, while the physics engine handles Keplerian orbits, Newtonian N-body gravity, educational relativistic corrections, photon paths, collisions, and other simulations. The heavier simulation work runs inside a Web Worker so the interface and 3D scene remain responsive. I also created separate spaces for the solar-system simulator, physics experiments and chemistry reactions. Nova was designed to understand the available experiments and simulation state, allowing it to provide more useful answers than a general-purpose chatbot by leveraging edge ai that can be run on any local laptop using lmstudio specially gemma4e2b. Codex helped me move quickly between the idea, implementation, debugging, testing, and refinement of the experience.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest challenge was balancing scientific accuracy with performance and clarity. Space involves extreme differences in size, distance, mass, and time. A perfectly accurate scale would make most objects impossible to see, while a visually convenient scale could easily become misleading. Keeping N-body simulations stable while allowing users to change parameters was another major challenge. Small changes can create enormous effects, and the simulation still had to run smoothly in a browser. I also had to bring several different experiences together without making the project feel like a collection of unrelated demos. The solar-system simulator, physics playground, chemistry bench, classroom missions, and Nova tutor all needed to feel like parts of the same learning environment.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am most proud that Cosmos Classroom became more than a 3D model. It is a working environment where students can change the laws or starting conditions, form a prediction, run an experiment, collect observations, and understand the result. Also the ability to leverage local edge ai to find and display the correct simulation according to what user wants to see is also one of the other things that i am most proud of I am also proud of the range we managed to include: orbital mechanics, gravity, spacetime concepts, AP Physics experiments and chemistry reactions Most importantly, the project stays honest about its scientific models. It explains when something is simplified, visually exaggerated, or intended for education rather than professional research.

What we learned

I learned that building an educational simulation is not only a physics or rendering problem. A beautiful model is not automatically a useful learning tool. Students need context, clear controls, guided questions, and explanations that connect what they see to the underlying equation. I also learned that AI is most helpful when it is grounded in the actual application. Nova became much more useful when it could understand the available tools, experiments, and simulation state. On a personal level, this project showed me that curiosity can be a strong starting point for building something meaningful. The questions I had as a child ended up guiding many of the decisions I made.

What's next for cosmos classroom

Next, I want to add more guided lessons, celestial objects, physics experiments, and chemistry reactions. The long-term vision is for Cosmos Classroom to become a place where anyone can explore a scientific question, change the variables, and learn by watching the answer unfold.

Built With

• codex
• gpt5.6
• node.js
• react-18
• three.js
• typescript
• vite
• vitest
• zustand