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It is common for freshmen students to enter Calculus I with a wide range of levels of preparation and mastery of background material. In addition, many of the students struggle with the adjustment from high school to college. In an effort to help the students to solidify their understanding of concepts as they progress through the course, as well as to start to think like test makers instead of simply test takers, we implemented the use of a structured and mandatory post-exam assignment. We present our approach that was designed to help the weaker students to solidify their knowledge of the course material while engaging the students who have a strong background in the development of their study skills.

Productive learning environments strike a balance between student motivation and the necessary learning outcomes associated with a particular course. This article explores one way to achieve such a balance and discusses some of the subtle benefits that spring from that balance. We designed a network science course that achieves course objectives and at the same time allows students to develop, test, and monitor a network of their own choosing. Rather than use canned networks, we introduce a set of assignments called the Network Profile Summary in which students continually apply newly learned course concepts to their selected networks and are therefore able to realize the utility and place of these concepts. This course design fosters student motivation and encourages independent learning. Under this pedagogical paradigm, students began to see coursework, concepts and feedback as productive and globally meaningful rather than corrective and locally meaningful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A review of the article "Characterizing Information Importance and Its Spread," by James Flamino, Alex Norman and Madison Wyatt, which appeared in this issue, is presented.

The article offers information on the International Conglomerate of Money's (ICM) contest inviting economic models across the world for effective use of their financial resources enabling sustainable development. Topics discussed include directions given by ICM to participants such as creating a sustainability model of a country and examining the reliability of the model, formation of panel of judges to evaluate papers and models and winning paper submitted by the Humboldt State University.

The authors comment on the impact of using network model to build and measure properties of citation or co-author networks. They are critical on the Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling (ICM) mathematics contest involving an applied modeling problem for human-environment interactions in several environmental sciences including food security, climatology, and geography. Also investigated is the descriptive analysis for network model such as path length, degree distribution and clustering.