The Art and Science of Teaching Rust

This talk explores a longitudinal study on how people learn Rust, conducted by Will Craton and his colleagues. The research focuses on identifying specific areas where learners struggle and developing targeted interventions to improve the learning process. The study involved adding quizzes to the official Rust programming language textbook and analyzing the responses of thousands of learners to pinpoint difficult concepts. The presenter discusses how small changes to the textbook, informed by this data, led to significant improvements in comprehension, particularly around complex topics like ownership and the borrow checker. The talk also introduces visualization tools designed to help learners grasp the underlying mechanisms of Rust's memory management and borrow checking. The ultimate goal is to make Rust more accessible by applying scientific methods to its educational materials.