The COSMOS program is intended as a way to allow high school students to sample what it is like to perform actual research in their chosen fields. The program introduces students to some of the same concepts used in the design of CIBER. Located on four University of California campuses (Davis , Irvine , San Diego and Santa Cruz), COSMOS provides students with an unparalleled opportunity to work side-by-side with outstanding university faculty and researchers, covering topics extending beyond the typical high school curriculum.

The Name Project seeks to give students a glimpse into the world of research by presenting them with the challenge of running an experiment and analyzing the data.

The students use model rockets with an affixed thermometer and barometer payload to take data. They then analyze the data by plotting the pressure and temperature curves in order to derive the height the rocket reached.

The students use a custom built payload to take the data, which is constructed based on designs from 50 Model Rocket Projects for the Evil Genius, by Gavin Harper. The payload's initial launches utilized the Estes Maxtrax rocket kits, but current project designs use the larger Estes Mean Machine rockets instead. The payload's programming is done using Parallax's Basic Stamp Editor, as is the data recovery. The data analysis is done with Microsoft Excel.