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The motivation of students to actively engage in course activities has significant impact on the outcome of academic courses. Prior studies have shown that innovative instructional interventions and course delivery methods have a vital role in boosting the motivation of students. Gamification tools aid course delivery by utilizing well established game design principles to enhance skill development, routine practice and self-testing. In this article, we present a study on how the use of a course gamification platform dubbed OneUp impacts the motivation of students in an online cyber security course. The study shows that more than 90% of the respondents agreed that OneUp has improved the effectiveness of the course delivery. In addition, 75% of the respondents want to use OneUp in their future courses. Furthermore, our analysis shows that OneUp has improved the median grade of students from B+ to A- compared to the same course delivered the previous year without using OneUp. 

Consider the scattering of a time-harmonic elastic plane wave by a periodic rigid surface. The elastic wave propagation is governed by the two-dimensional Navier equation. Based on a Dirichlet-to-Neumann (DtN) map, a transparent boundary condition (TBC) is introduced to reduce the scattering problem into a boundary value problem in a bounded domain. By using the finite element method, the discrete problem is considered, where the TBC is replaced by the truncated DtN map. A new duality argument is developed to derive the a posteriori error estimate, which contains both the finite element approximation error and the DtN truncation error. An a posteriori error estimate based adaptive finite element algorithm is developed to solve the elastic surface scattering problem. Numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. 

The Bransfield Basin is a back-arc basin located in Western Antarctica between the South Shetland Islands and Antarctic Peninsula. Although the subduction of the Phoenix plate under the South Shetland block has ceased, extension continues through a combination of slab rollback and transtensional motions between the Scotia and Antarctic plates. This process has created a continental rift in the basin, interleaved with volcanic islands and seamounts, which may be near the transition from rifting to seafloor spreading. In the framework of the BRAVOSEIS project (2017–2020), we deployed a dense amphibious seismic network in the Bransfield Strait comprising 15 land stations and 24 ocean-bottom seismometers, as well as a network of 6 moored hydrophones; and acquired marine geophysics data including multibeam bathymetry, sub-bottom profiler, gravity & magnetics, multi-channel seismics, and seismic refraction data. The experiment has collected a unique, high quality, and multifaceted geophysical data set in the Central Bransfield Basin, with a special focus on Orca and Humpback seamounts. Preliminary results confirm that the Bransfield region has slab-related intermediate depth seismicity, with earthquake characteristics suggesting distributed extension across the rift. Gravity and magnetic highs delineate a segmented rift with along-axis variations that are consistent with increased accumulated strain to the northeast. Orca volcano shows evidences of an active caldera and magma accumulation at shallow depths, while Humpback volcano has evolved past the caldera stage and is currently dominated by rifting structures. These differences suggest that volcanic evolution is influenced by the position along the rift. Although a lot of analysis remains, these results provide useful constraints on the structure and dynamics of the Bransfield rift and associated volcanoes.