teachers_guide.md

Teacher's companion to teach-rs

If you have decided to try teach-rs for your students, you will probably run into two problems:

1. As an academic, you may feel your own practical knowledge of Rust is lacking.

2. You will have to make a selection of subjects to fit practical constraints.

So what parts of teach-rs should you invest time in to teach to your students? And how much time is required?

We assume you have a clear idea of your learning outcomes, and your target audience. Teach-rs can be used for first-year students at university, for master's students, or even for an internal training for senior engineers at your software company, but obviously different groups would require a different approach!

Teach-rs is a modular course

We have defined particular tracks, which consists of selections of modules that go well together given a certain learning outcome and target audience, for example teach-rs focussed on Web programming or teach-rs focussed on Embedded Devices; you can see the full list of tracks here:

Finer-grained modularity

If you want finer-grained control over content selection, we have structured every module into a few topics. A topics is defined by a set of slides and recommended exercises. You can construct your own modules by selectiong topics. We have defined dependencies between topics; for example, if you pick the basic-syntax topic you should also select the why-rust topic. These dependencies ensure that you should still end up with a coherent course.

If you take this route, however, you have to take more responsibility that the study load remains balanced, as (unlike with modules), topics don't have a fixed study time associated with them. For example (again), the why-rust topic will require less time (and has no partical exercises attached to it) than the basic-syntax topic. Since teach-rs is in active development, we cannot give time estimates per topic and are focussing more on balancing the study load for the full course and the pre-defined tracks.

Overview of modules and topics

General modules of the Rust course can be divided into "common" and "specialized" modules. The common ones will be useful for every track (for example, "Language Basics") whereas others can be viewed as optional (for example, "Rust for Web").

Module 0 (introduction) is recommended in full for every course, since it outlines the motivation for learning Rust, and broadly introduces its features. Module A contains all topics related to language features.

Reference material

Several online resources exists that can provide valuable background material for you (or your students).

• The Rust Programming Language, online book, also available as paperback
• Rust by Example, online reference with idiomatic examples of Rust code
• Rust for Rustaceans, book that assumes some prior knowledge and dives into more advanced topics
• Learning Rust with Entirely Too Many Linked Lists, focussing on Rust's ownership and borrowing rules
• Rust Design Patterns, a collection of idiomatic Rust patterns (and anti-patterns)
• The Rust Reference, a reference suitable for finding explanations for finer points of syntax and semantics.
• The Rustonomicon, a reference that is specific to low-level aspects, application binary interfaces and unsafe code.

Exercise solutions

Teach-rs is provided without answers to exercises. If you have need of those, please contact us.