The CBSE School Lab Glossary: Every Term, Defined
Every acronym a principal, ICT coordinator or procurement officer runs into while setting up an AI, Robotics, STEM or Composite Skill Lab, defined plainly, with the government source next to it.
CBSE mandates and compliance
The terms that determine whether your lab passes an affiliation inspection.
Composite Skill Lab (CSL)
A single multi-disciplinary laboratory that CBSE requires affiliated schools to establish, replacing the older model of separate subject-specific skill rooms. One room, multiple skill domains, so a school runs robotics, electronics, design and applied-science work in the same physical space, on a shared timetable, using shared infrastructure. The mandate was introduced through CBSE Circular No. Skill-75/2024 and applies to schools offering skill subjects at the secondary level.
Source: CBSE Circular No. Skill-75/2024, dated 27 August 2024.
CBSE Circular No. Skill-75/2024
The circular, dated 27 August 2024, that directs CBSE-affiliated schools to set up a Composite Skill Lab. It sets a compliance deadline of 22 August 2027, which is why 2026–27 is the procurement year for most schools, a lab ordered in the final months typically cannot be commissioned, staff-trained and running before the deadline.
Source: CBSE, Circular Skill-75/2024. See also our full explainer.
Annexure 7
The annexure to the CBSE Composite Skill Lab guidelines that specifies what the lab must physically contain equipment categories, infrastructure and safety requirements, section by section. This is the document an inspection is actually run against. A lab can look impressive and still fail if its bill of materials does not map to these sections. Ask any vendor to show you their BOM mapped line-by-line to Annexure 7; if they cannot produce that mapping, the audit risk sits with the school, not the vendor.
Source: CBSE Academic — Guidelines for setting up Composite Skill Lab.
Skill Subject Code 417: Artificial Intelligence
CBSE's Artificial Intelligence skill subject for Classes 9 and 10. It carries its own syllabus, practical component and board assessment, and is the most widely adopted AI skill subject in Indian schools. A lab intended to support Code 417 needs hardware capable of running practical AI work vision, sensing and data collection, not just block-based coding.
Source: CBSE Skill Education curriculum documents.
Subject Code 843: Artificial Intelligence
CBSE's Artificial Intelligence elective for Classes 11 and 12, the senior-secondary continuation of the Code 417 pathway. Schools that stop lab investment at Class 10 usually find they cannot offer 843 credibly, because the practical requirements step up.
Source: CBSE Senior Secondary curriculum.
Government schemes and programmes
Funding and designation routes that change what a school can afford.
Atal Tinkering Lab (ATL)
A government-funded innovation workspace established in schools under the Atal Innovation Mission. Selected schools receive a grant-in-aid to set up and run a tinkering space with prototyping tools, electronics and fabrication equipment. An ATL is not the same thing as a Composite Skill Lab — ATL is a competitive, grant-funded innovation programme; CSL is a CBSE affiliation requirement. A school can have one, both, or neither, and the equipment lists overlap only partially.
Source: Atal Innovation Mission. See our comparison of CSL vs AI & Robotics Lab vs ATL.
Atal Innovation Mission (AIM)
The Government of India's flagship innovation programme, run under NITI Aayog, which funds Atal Tinkering Labs in schools and Atal Incubation Centres beyond them. AIM publishes the grant utilisation rules that govern how ATL money may be spent, worth reading before committing to a vendor quotation, because not every line item is claimable.
Source: AIM Grant-in-Aid Fund Utilization Guidelines.
PM SHRI Schools
PM Schools for Rising India. A central scheme under which selected government and government-aided schools are upgraded to exemplar status, with funding that typically covers modern laboratory and ICT infrastructure. PM SHRI designation usually unlocks a lab budget that the school did not previously have, which is why designated schools are a distinct buying segment.
Source: Ministry of Education, Government of India.
Policy frameworks
The documents every vendor claims alignment with. Here is what they actually say.
National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020)
India's overarching education policy, which introduced the requirement that vocational and skill exposure begin from Grade 6, alongside a broader shift toward experiential and competency-based learning. Most current lab mandates including the Composite Skill Lab, trace back to NEP 2020's skill-integration provisions.
Source: Ministry of Education — NEP 2020.
National Curriculum Framework for School Education 2023 (NCF SE 2023)
The curriculum framework that operationalises NEP 2020, translating policy intent into stage-wise learning outcomes and subject structures. When a vendor says a curriculum is "NEP-aligned", the substantive question is whether it maps to NCF SE 2023 learning outcomes at the right stage, or whether the claim is decorative.
Source: NCERT, NCF SE 2023.
Computational Thinking (CT)
The problem-solving approach; decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction, algorithm design that underpins CBSE's AI and coding curriculum from the primary stage. CT is assessed through reasoning, not only through code, which is why a lab that only teaches kit assembly under-delivers against the syllabus.
Source: CBSE Computational Thinking and AI curriculum, Classes 3–8.
Procurement and compliance
The vocabulary of the purchase order, not the classroom.
Bill of Materials (BOM)
The itemised list of every component in a lab — make, model, specification and quantity. The BOM is the only document that tells you what you are actually buying. A quotation that gives a lump sum against a lab name, without a BOM, cannot be compared against a competing quotation and cannot be audited against Annexure 7. Always ask for it in writing before signing.
Grobots publishes BOM coverage by CBSE section on the Composite Skills Lab page.
Government e-Marketplace (GeM)
The Government of India's public procurement platform. Government and government-aided schools frequently must purchase lab equipment through GeM rather than by direct order, which constrains which vendors they can buy from, a vendor without GeM presence simply cannot be bought from by those schools, regardless of product quality.
Source: gem.gov.in.
OASIS
CBSE's Online Affiliated School Information System, the portal through which affiliated schools submit and update mandatory information, including infrastructure declarations. Lab compliance data is reported here, which is why documentation matters as much as the equipment itself.
Source: CBSE.
Single-PO turnkey
A delivery model where one vendor takes a single purchase order and is accountable for everything; equipment supply, furniture, installation, curriculum, teacher training and support. The alternative, splitting a lab across multiple suppliers, is usually cheaper on paper and more expensive in practice, because responsibility for anything that fails becomes contested.
Grobots delivers on a single PO. See Set up a lab.
Technical terms
What the hardware words mean when a vendor uses them.
Microbit
An open, education-focused microcontroller board developed by the BBC and now maintained by the Micro:bit Educational Foundation. It is programmable from multiple environments; block-based MakeCode, MicroPython, and mobile app builders, which matters because a school is not locked into one vendor's proprietary software. Widely used internationally, so teaching resources are abundant and free.
Source: microbit.org.
AI Vision / Machine Vision module
A camera plus onboard processing that lets a student project recognise objects, faces, colours or gestures without a connected computer. This is the practical difference between a robotics lab and an AI robotics lab Code 417 practical work needs students to train and test a model, not just wire a sensor.
See AI & Robotics Lab.
Proprietary vs open platform
A proprietary controller runs only the vendor's own software and accepts only the vendor's own accessories. An open platform runs industry-standard tooling and third-party parts. The consequence is felt in Year 3, when a component fails or the vendor relationship ends: an open platform can be repaired and extended from the open market; a proprietary one cannot.
See Compare lab models.
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