Rust Programming Language Rust Education Workshop 2022, 4 Sep 2022

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From YouTube: RustEdu Workshop 2022 - “The Book” and Rustlings Adaptation

Description

Vitaly Bragilevsky describes a JetBrains project that integrates: exercises inspired by the Rustlings Rust learning exercise suite; references to exercise-relevant documentation; and a playground for exploring solutions. These are made simultaneously accessible via a novel UI within the JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA and CLion tools.

The project is freely available at https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/16631-rustlings.

A

um Yeah, so uh I will talk about just one way to learn rust. Of course, uh there are many, many others, and it's not uh it. Maybe it's not the best one, but still here's what we have so we're going to talk about self learner first, so it's just a person who wants to learn rust and we presume that this person knows one other programming language and otherwise it's a little bit different.

A

So I'm not going to talk about trust as the first programming language, so there are so basic ways to learn a new programming language like you can read a book. You can look at examples, especially if you like know some other programming language. Sometimes you don't want to read a long, long text. You just look at examples and get ideas and go with that and of course you can solve problems and usually, when we're talking about solving problems, it's good idea to have some tests just to check.

A

If it's all right, if you get it correctly, are there any problems and in rus community we have several resources for doing exactly that. Like we have ras programming language book, we call it the book one of the most important books for first-time rust learners.

A

We also have great resource trust by example like for several areas of uh uh things like common line arguments, iterators ownership and examples for all those topics, and we have rustlings rustlings is a collection of small exercises not to learn the whole rust, but just to get your hands wet in rust features.

A

But in this situation something is missing and when I say that I mean tooling and three-edged brains, where I just do tools for things like that. So I want to present one tool from our educational content team, which is called wrestling's adaptation, so we adopt wrestlings and we made something new of it. So here is an example of a window.

A

It's an ide where you can see a course structure. You can see some code example and you can see fragment of the rust programming language book, which describes this example. In fact, what we done we take the book and make it into many many small pieces and for every small pieces we just take one.

A

The most important example in this fragment- and here you can see this code- you can work with it as usual in ide. You can run it. You can explore errors, you can do whatever you like in in with this window and then, of course, there are problems that you can solve and for problems. You can write your solution.

A

For example, this is a problem uh which goes about ownership, which variable own value at which moment- and you just have to do something with that, and then you write some code and then you check it and then you get. uh Is it correct or not? I I think, with rust.

A

In most cases, one can find uh himself or herself with looking at these errors, and you can do that because it's ide, you can look at errors at this moment of course, uh and then with uh you, can explore something uh uh how some output, if you did it correctly.

A

So this is just a tool for reading for looking at examples and for actually writing programs, and you can do all that stuff in just one window of this ide.

A

So what is this wrestling's things wrestling's by dead brains, our adaptation? So we take texts and examples from the book. We also take problems from rustling's original course and then you can add usual rust tool chain we have you have. You should take some ide from jetbrains, any of them like by charm or whatever uh cli and intelligent idea, and then you have this intellij ras plugin, and once you have all that you need uh educational platform, which is which comes as a plug-in and this rustlings plug-in, which is a course developed.

A

Using this platform, uh we've made a new release of this course this august, so it it's not a new course, but we've updated we've revised it um very significantly like this week and it covers 14 chapters out of 20, so not all of that, but just some part of it. um We have 210 theory steps like every theory, step, small part of theory, and example 210.

A

Examples like that. uh So it's quite a lot, but it's it's all about small chunks. So if you like, learning through growing small chunks, that's that's something that you may find useful, and then we also have more than 100 problems. So every step is just some small problem which was adopted from wrestling.

A

So uh it's not about writing a big program. So it's not something that could cover uh all needs of some, professor at the university. Of course.

A

No, it's just for self learners to make you acquaint it with language features, and then we also have several steps for id how to learn ide, how to do things there like how to do refactoring rename a variable extract function, how to uh set some options, some preferences, how to use it, but mainly it's all about rust and how to solve problems in rust and how to use ide for programming in rust.

A

So this is quite a large course and we suggest one particular scenario for using it. So you just look at example, and from my experience I always recommend to look at the example. First, there is a chance that you understand everything and in that case it's not necessary to understand everything. It's not necessary to read something. You just look at the example and get the idea, and then you go trying to solve exercises.

A

Okay, so sometimes you don't need to read anything, but of course you can because it's all here just don't have to go anywhere, so you can read corresponding book fragment and we try to make it small, really small. So just you don't have to read for an hour to get to this, but that's why we have so many steps. Of course, then one extremely important thing like I was working in uh high education for 20 years and they know if you just look at example.

A

If you just read something it's almost useless, you have to play with the code you have to edit it. You have to run it. You have to explore errors, otherwise it it will never work. So you have to change something and see how compiler react. How rust react to what you are trying to do so it's very important and then, after working with this example, theory step.

A

You just go to the next step and it can be anything can be another theory, example or it can be task, and if it's tasked some some learners prefer trying to first task to solve tasks. First, they just go. Oh nice task, let me solve it and then they get into a lot of troubles and then trust, it's very easy to get into trouble and once they're in trouble they can get back to examples and read text and whatever. So so, it's okay not to follow the specified path.

A

But if it's example theory step when it's a good idea to explore it, if it's a problem, it's it's good to solve it too, because otherwise you don't learn anything.

A

uh So when I say adaptation, so we've adopted rustling exercises. I should say that we are not in one-on-one correspondence. So when I go through wrestling's original wrestlings myself, I sometimes see that. Well, there can be some problems with the problem descriptions, maybe sometimes they're, not very uh good, at checking. If it's correct, if the solution is correct or not so, we've tried to mates made it a little bit different.

A

So uh we have specific karga project for each task and that's why we can learn more. We can. We can teach more with this. We can teach module system, we can teach all this stuff about library, create binary, create and we can teach about cargo thermal files, so sometimes you're allowed to see tests to check them to uh change them somehow, so you can just learn real rust software development with that, and I have to say that all that we're doing about that is free.

A

Well, not all our ids are free, but everything for wrestling's course is available for free. It works an hour in the free editions of our ids. So all our plugins rust edit tools and trust links work for free, so anyone can use it no need to pay. So we're not selling that well, because jetbrains works in education for many years and we try to deliver everything uh for free and, of course, uh if you're, a student or a faculty you can even buy, you can even take professional ids for free too. So it's also possible.

A

So you just you, can go to this page and then all faculty and students get everything like c line and everything else for free, but once again it's not necessary to buy anything for doing this wrestling's course.

A

So that's it. Thank you very much and yeah. I was a little bit quick here. I think so here is a link to this course, but it's easy to find uh anyway, if you write wrestlings and jet brains.

A

Okay, thank you and I it looks like there are some questions here.

B

Yeah thanks vitelli for the great talk and uh we'll run straight into some questions, so I can just narrate them so yuri asks how many people worked on making this tool, I'm asking, because, probably in the future, the same kind of course could be done for other languages. What do you think.

A

um Well, this course is special, so we are not doing it from scratch, so it is just parts of wrestling's uh from original courses parts from something from uh the book, so it was relatively easy like this. This course exists for I think four years and I've made this. uh I've made a loan, this major refactoring for a couple of months, so but usually developing a course is just one or two person uh like for several months, so I wouldn't say that it's very difficult. Of course, it takes time to to write tests.

A

We have several sorts kinds of tests for that, but it's it's not so. Edutools is a good platform. You can. You can write courses in in that platform. It's quite easy. There are good documentation, so you don't need many people to for doing courses. Of course it's not about doing plugins, but doing courses is relatively easy. Everything is ready for that.

B

All right uh next questions from bart is: can you or are you contributing back to wrestlings? I think folks be grateful for that, although it might pose challenges.

A

Absolutely absolutely uh so: we've added several exercises new exercises and we want to add them to rustlings too, unfortunately, for it takes a lot of time for wrestling's maintainers to keep keep along with all uh pull requests. So, of course, we'll add our exercises there. Truly, that's that's important and we own that.

B

All right matthew asks: do you have any user studies that narrow in on why this approach works, parentheses, possibly better than something else.

A

uh No, I don't think so. So we we have some experience of uh other courses for other languages like for kotlin for python, and I should say that this wrestling adaptation is not very popular. It's it's less less popular than kotlin or python course, but we are not trying to explore that. So I wouldn't say this is a mainstream uh direction for our educational department. So we don't spend resources on researching that.

B

Got it well, there's another question similar to user studies from galileo who asks: how do you integrate feedback into the courses? I could imagine this being a super valuable tool for other contributors for wrestling, given the potential for tight integration of the feedback system into the ide, slash course, functionality.

A

Well, uh yeah, first for for every task we have a special button for sending some feedback. So you can. You can just write whatever you think about this task and what is more, this course is published openly on github. So anyone can add a task to it can just fix something just send pull requests and we are looking at that. So we are trying, so everything is open source. So it's it's quite easy to contribute.

B

All right and then there's a question from me, which was uh I it's it's interesting. You talked about how it's important that students need to not just read but interact with examples in order to understand them and I'm curious it part of the challenge. I I guess I see in that is.

B

uh It seems like an unstructured process like how do I tell a student go play with this example, and so I'm curious if you've seen, I don't know certain patterns of interactions or if there's any kind of methodology, you could say, helps students more effectively interact with examples, so they learn the underlying concepts.

A

Well, from my experience, it's important to show them first, what what does it mean to play with examples like if you're talking about something during the lecture, then you can show? Well, we have this example. Let's try to do something different. Let's try to add some a variable. Let's try to.

A

I don't know uh just remove this and see what's going on, so you just show them first and then they know what to do, but but it's important that they are not working by some predefined steps, because predefined steps is different, so they do need to start learning by themselves anyway. So I just, I think, it's a good idea to show them examples. First, how you do that and then they quite quickly pick up your idea.

A

That's what I think.

B

Great uh rose asks a follow-up, which is, I agree with the idea of playing in lecture. Is there a way to replicate that, for.

A

Self-Studiers, oh, that, that's that's a hard question. I don't know. Actually maybe it's a good. Maybe it's a good idea for us to promote this course just to regular video. How should we work uh through this course and show that so maybe thank you part there I'll think about it. Maybe it's a good idea really yeah, so just just just to show how to work just by some recording some video. Thank you.