Experience of teaching this course to 20 university students

[FalkWoldmann]

Hi everyone, I've had the pleasure of lecturing this course as part of a seminar at my former uni. Most of the students had a background in Java or JavaScript. The course was part comprehensive Rust and part Rustlings with the tasks in comprehensive Rust as the final challenge per chapter. The feedback was generally good, but one part caused confusion.

The students were quite confused to what references are used for, since the course only introduces them without ownership. Therefore, I pivoted and covered ownership right there. In my opinion, this makes it way easier to grok the need for references. This structure also aligns better with The Book and the Rustlings.

[mgeisler]

Hi @FalkWoldmann,

Thank you so much for writing about the experience! It's wonderful to hear when people use the material in different settings 😊 Can you tell me more about which university this was at? How many people did you have in the seminar? If you write up an evaluation of the material, then I would love to link it from our README!

Also, if you have any patches to send our way, please do — the course gets better every time someone teaches it. I finally fixed (#2954) an annoying newline in a break when I taught the material two weeks ago at Proton 😄

For the topic at hand, I think I approached references by saying that they avoid copying values from one place on the stack to another when doing a function call. But I'm pretty sure I also gave a sneak preview of how things like String needs it to avoid moving the value away from the caller. Such detours via the live-coding is something that people really liked in my recent class.