The breakup of a sheet of fluid into rivulets is familiar to us all from real-life experiments such as pouring maple syrup onto pancakes or chocolate sauce onto an ice cream sundae. These problems also arise in industrial applications, such as creating thin insulating layers on microchips, and biological applications, including studying how thin layers of tears lubricate the eye. The paper "Instabilities in Gravity Driven Flow of Thin Fluid Films" by Lou Kondic provides a nice framework for introducing students to theoretical, numerical, and experimental work studying these films. Drawing on his undergraduate teaching experience, the author leads readers on a journey from the Navier--Stokes equation describing a fluid, through an asymptotic reduction to the thin film approximation, and then to a numerical simulation of these equations, and finally to comparisons with an experimental apparatus built with a group of students. Along the way, the reader also receives an introduction to linear stability theory and a lesson on interpreting experimental data. As problems arising from fluid mechanics represent a vibrant and growing research area in the application of mathematics, this paper provides useful guidelines for leading advanced undergraduate or graduate students up to the boundaries of contemporary research in the area---and pouring syrup on pancakes may never quite be the same for them ever again. The other, shorterpaper in this issue's Education section is a journey into one of the fundamental numerical optimization problems---the integer programming problem---and perhaps its most classic example, the traveling salesman problem. In "Teaching Integer Programming Formulations Using the Traveling Salesman Problem," author Gabor Pataki emphasizes the concept of strong and weak formulations of integer programming problems and the effects that using these formulations has upon the computational performance of integer programming algorithms. The paper enables students to learn the differences between formulations by example using a fairly simple and appealing framework. The combination of a brief MATLAB code supplied in the paper and almost any commercial integer programming solver will allow students to experience the comparison between formulations for themselves. The paper makes a nice, simple module to accompany the teaching of integer programming at either undergraduate or graduate level.