It was observed that students who have the opportunity to experiment freely with systems they have to understand learn faster and more in-depth than those who don't have such opportunities. A small research group exploring routing algorithms for wireless sensor networks has a serious resource allocation problem: the experienced researchers have to spend too much of their time bringing future researchers to the level necessary to start innovative master's thesis work, with a consequence a too limited growth rate for the research group. the potential role of a user-friendly didactic wireless sensor network simulator is being explored for partially solving the resources problem.