Teach-rs

Teach-rs is a university course for computer science students, introducing the Rust Programming Language, and is available for anyone who wants to teach Rust.

Why? Have a look at our blog post introducing the course.

This repo will contain everything that's needed to organize the course: slides, exercises, tools, setup instructions and more.

While all the available material is user-ready, this repo is not yet as exhaustive as we'd like, so feedback and contributions are welcome! So is sponsorship; read more below or on our Sponsorship page.

Need help? Have questions? Say hi in our Matrix channel:

Intent

Teach-rs is meant to be a collection of teaching material about the Rust programming language for use in higher education (whether that be universities focused on theoretical science, educational institutes of applied science, or higher vocational education). More broadly, it is intended to be also useful in any form of formal or informal classroom education (e.g., community colleges).

It is not a course in rust, but rather meant to be used by teachers to create a course in Rust tailored to the needs of their students. Hence, the name: teach-rs. That means that we expect (and encourage) every course that is taught using teach-rs to make different selections of material.

The goal of this project is therefore for teach-r to consist of:

• Exercise material: exercise instructions and templates.
• A reference slide deck for use in lectures.
• Tools to help teachers easily make selections of material that make sure that essential parts are not skipped.

What is not in scope of teach-rs:

• The equivalent of a "book", i.e., reading material; good external resources exist both online and in book form.

We do want to have a section on collecting all of those.

• Being usable as self-teaching aid. That is not to say that the material contained in this repository cannot be used

to become self-taught in Rust, but that is not the primary mission.

• Solutions to exercises. Some of our exercises are open-ended and have multiple correct solutions. In line with being

meant for use in higher education, students should reflect on their solutions themselves, discuss their work with their peers or receive feedback from their teacher/teaching assistants. The Rust compiler itself also lends itself well as a teaching aid: it will catch many mistakes and suggest improvements; i.e., various exercises may try to steer students into interaction with Rust compiler messages.

The material is free for any purpose (licensed under CC-BY-SA). It is highly appreciated that changes/improvements are contributed back to us, even if the license doesn't necessarily demand it.

Usage

The teacher's guide can be found here.

Structure

The actual content can be found in the content directory. The content is structured in a tree of Tracks, Modules, Units, and Topics. Tracks define a single course, which consists of one or more Modules, which again combines one or more Units, which again is a set of Topics. Units roughly correspond to one lecture+tutorial (or at least that is the idea, but TODO), and consist of several Topics. Related Units are combined in a Module. Topics are packages that cover a single topic, and include a small number of slides, some exercises, and an exercise descripion. Topics can define their learning objectives, further reading material, and how they should be summarized in a Unit introduction.

Tracks, Modules, Units, and Topics and the files they refer to are described in the several TOML files in the content directory.

Pre-defined tracks

• Rust Language Introduction aims to introduce the basics to the Rust programming language, and to enable students to engineer their own applications and crates.
• Rust for the Web covers content that is needed to use Rust in web applications.
• Rust for Systems Programming contains more low-level topics, to teach systems programming using Rust.
• Scientific Rust is about using Rust in scientific programming.
• Full contains all available teach-rs content.

Note: although the outline of the tracks is mostly complete, the tracks may still contain TODOs. You're invited to contribute your own content to fix these!

High-level goals

Teach-rs aims to provide an open-source course, lectures, tutorials and exercises, that can be used by any higher education institution. Use one of the pre-defined tracks, or compose your own with the content we provide and your own.

• Provide a modular, resuable basis for live-taught Rust courses
• Provide students with practical, hands-on experience
• Provide students with background information of Rust features
• Provide students with ability to judge whether Rust fits a project
• Provide several specialized learning tracks that focus on different applications (e.g. systems, embedded, web)
• Enable teachers to contribute their material for others to use

Contributing

If you'd like to improve teach-rs, either by doing touchups, restructuring a module, or even adding a module, please refer to the contributing guidelines before you get started.

About the project

The project was created by Tweede golf, and has since moved to the Trifecta Tech Foundation.

Our sponsors

Founding sponsors

The project's initial sponsor is the Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies (FIIT) of the Slovak University of Technology (STU) in Bratislava, Slovakia. FIIT's contribution has enabled us to lay the groundwork for the course. Tweede golf and Rust Edu have also contributed substantially to the creation of teach-rs.

In addition, one of our maintainers, @hdoordt, received a grant from the Rust Foundation.

Silver sponsors

And a big thank you to our Silver sponsors:

• Gofore
• RustJobs.dev

Support teach-rs

Contact us if you´re interested in financially supporting the maintenance and further development of the teach-rs resources. See trifectatech.org/support. You can also sponsor our work through GitHub sponsors.