Feedback for RustBridge@RustFest

[milibopp]

cc @broesamle @ashleygwilliams @steveklabnik @johannhof @hannelita
plus a few people, whose GitHub handles I don't know.

Please post your impressions of the RustBrigde workshop at RustFest today. Everybody who was part of the workshop is very welcome to add feedback, of course.

[milibopp]

My feedback:

• It's good to see that throwing a bunch of experienced Rustaceans in a room with people eager to learn seems to be half of what you need to get it running. Thank you everybody for making this work :)
• It was a good idea to use exercism.io as an alternative to get people started with the language @ashleygwilliams
• We had a lot of tech issues with the material. A workshop base project should run reliably on a bunch of platforms (Linux/Windows/MacOSX, 32bit/64bit, GPUs of different eras). For the graphical workshops, that means to be mindful of number and cross-platform compatibility of your dependencies. Also test it on a variety of systems.
• I don't think we were really prepared to cater to the requirements of complete beginners and provide adequate input and learning opportunities.
• The Wifi at Werkstatt could not deal too well with 40 people downloading a bunch of crates in parallel.

[broesamle]

Most important thank you goes to all the coaches making this a smooth experience for the learners...

...whom I want to thank, in turn, for their curiosity and patience (under the certainly not ideal conditions); be assured that I learned as much as you did!

some things to improve:

*learners should know in advance how to prepare their machines and we should announce this together with the programme. 

• Install fest
• sync dependencies and install fest instructions for each platform
• we could have announced a programme before the actual event took place
   : )

[carols10cents]

I've got questions-- we're going to be doing a rustbridge in Pittsburgh the weekend before Rust Belt Rust and I'd love to learn from your experiences!

• It sounds like there were both people who had programmed before and people who had not programmed before, correct? @aepsil0n could you elaborate on "I don't think we were really prepared to cater to the requirements of complete beginners and provide adequate input and learning opportunities", what were complete beginners' requirements that could have been catered to in a better way?
• What were the technical issues with the different platforms? mondrian workshop: main doesn't open piston window on macOS #56 and mondrian tutorial doesn't work - graphics issues #58, anything else?
• I see the plan for the program at RustFest: Agree on final program #51, but what actually ended up happening?
  • Which workshop(s) did you use or try to use?
  • What was the actual number of attendees+teachers+TAs?
  • How much time did you spend getting everyone set up and doing whichever activities ended up happening?
• Have you surveyed the attendees to see what they liked or didn't like about different aspects of the workshop?

[broesamle]

Great to hear that you want to continue!

• Our learners (mostly) had experiences in coding; personally, I did not encounter any complete beginners.
• Also, although we thought about it, we did not make a survey, mostly for time restrictions before and at the event.
• Program:
  • some people arrive, we ask the first ones about their level of experience
  • much more people arrive, we re-organise chairs and tables to make everybody fit (and cannot make an introduction round with 40 people, which we otherwise would recommend)
  • we give a quick intro (workshops.md) about rustbridge, the program of today, the preliminary status of the materials, encouraged to ask any questions, tell about the location, the drinks and snacks, code of conduct etc.
  • People worked mor or less self-paced along the material; coaches were available to answer questions and/or modify exercises as needed
• Workssops we used:
  • mondrian for the beginners
  • the text adventure for the more advanced learners
  • due to the graphics bug in the mondrian, some learners switched to some other online learning platform ?_________________? (may somebody help me with the name, please : )
• Technical issues: As soon as mondrian workshop: main doesn't open piston window on macOS #56 is properly sorted it should work with most linux/mac machines. The main concern is Need platform agnostic graphics with few dependencies #53 and/or suitable instructions for installing cf. WANTED! Installfest and Example Testers #45.

[booyaa]

@broesamle

due to the graphics bug in the mondrian, some learners switched to some other online learning platform ?_________________?

I suspect this was exercism.io as mentioned by @aepsil0n

[ashleygwilliams]

hi all! 👋

background about me (for context): professional teacher. i run a NodeBridge, called NodeTogether. i'm at best an advanced beginner in Rust.

i attended RustFest as a coach and was the person who took a group of Mac users into the backroom to work on something else. a bunch of other people ended up joining us.

i used exercism.io (as @booyaa pointed out) and did some teaching as well. the things i taught were:

• the src directory and main.rs vs lib.rs
• how to write a function signature (pub, the fn keyword, name: Type parameter syntax, and -> return type)
• &str, String the differences and similarities
• the Option type
• match syntax
• format! and println! macros
• how to read error messages
• cargo: what is it

without those things, all of the students felt lost. but with just those things, all the students were able to (sometimes with a little guidance) search for whatever else they needed in the book/docs.

some thoughts:

• most of the students came from a previous language (C++, Java, JavaScript, Ruby)
• studentswere Not Happy At All about have to install and run a lot of code that was not explained to them. many told me that "just changing values" [in the Mondrian workshop] was not teaching them anything about Rust.
• students really enjoyed the test driven approach because it allowed them some independence
• students really enjoyed the teaching portion as it gave them some knowledge and confidence to move forward with

changes for next time:

• do an install fest. explain what is being installed and why. show people how to know they have it installed.
• definitely do an intro to rust chat- teach at least the things i just mentioned above. the book is great- but it is STILL not super good for people who have no experience in rust. also telling people to read when they are surrounded by mentors isn't fair. they can read at home. we should be encouraging them to communicate with mentors and each other.
• group people by background and skill. they can help each other and draw connections to their shared previous experience.
• build exercises that are small and students feel like they can control. yes it is true that feeling as though you built something visual and "cool" is motivating. but feeling like you didn't actually write any of it and have no idea how to build it yourself isn't cool. for better or worse, the people who will show up at RustBridge know what rust is, which means they probably don't need to be convinced that programming is cool. instead they need to be shown that they too can write and understand rust. a project with a 1000 deps and a bunch of code that is not explained or written by the student actually does the opposite. many students told me they felt intimidated by the examples and workshops. rust is tricky to do this, but looking at the exercism problems shows that it's possible. i think it is OK if the only interface is a test suite, its better than building an interface on the command line or otherwise that is hard to explain.
• tell people what kinds of projects to build with Rust. people are excited about Rust, but often don't know what to build with it. the workshops we give should be examples that help the student brainstorm things they would write on their own. a personal project is by far the best way to learn anything so a secondary goal we should have is inspiring that by example.

i would love to help out with this more, but definitely struggle with having enough time. would love to hop on a call and talk more.

[milibopp]

It sounds like there were both people who had programmed before and people who had not programmed before, correct? @aepsil0n could you elaborate on "I don't think we were really prepared to cater to the requirements of complete beginners and provide adequate input and learning opportunities", what were complete beginners' requirements that could have been catered to in a better way?

Well, there was a sense of being overwhelmed by the technical complexity of our examples. I also think there were not enough coaches to get them started with Rust. I got to a few people only towards the end of the session and saw they had hardly progressed beyond getting set up.

A lot of this churn was due to our dependencies. We can't use Piston for this purpose (likely any of Rust's current gamedev stack will face the same fate).

[broesamle]

to me this condenses to:

• make an install fest before
• have enough coaches and time to assign learners in appropriate groups/workshops so that:
  • people with experience don't do basic 'not cool' code manipulations
  • have beginners in a productive phase with elementary, feedback-intensive tasks early on
• be more proactive in checking learners progress

[hannelita]

Hi! I am sorry for the delay to reply this.
I have attended a full day Haskeel workshop where we got the following approach:

• Install fest - make sure everyone has the proper env. A mentor would show the process and all the participants would work together.
• Basic (boring) exercises, such as char/str replacement, creating a representation of a bank account, etc. Again, everyone together. This helped to give the initial feeling of the language for everyone. It probably was a bit boring to advanced users, but those ones immediately volunteered to help the beginners.
• An intermediate exercise, comparing Haskell with other languages; creating an HTTP request, performing a GET/POST. Everyone together, like a traditional class.
• Lunch Break
• Returning from lunch, a bunch of exercises were available - from basic advanced challenges. Besides that, suggestions of open source projects to help with. Groups of 2 or 3 ppl were made.
• Mentors had to make sure that all the participants were engaged in some activity. They would do pair programming with a participant until he or she finds something interesting, or try to guide the groups.
• They also provided a separate room in the format of a class, so if you did not want to code, you could still learn something.
• We had people entirely new to programming! Hopefully on of the mentors volunteered himself to improvise a lecture in the format of a programming intro class using Haskell. We got good feedback from the audience.

Maybe we could use some of these ideas for the next Rust Bridge! :)

[steveklabnik]

I had a lot to say, but didn't really have time to reply till now. And it seems like @ashleygwilliams and @hannelita have said everything I would have said, so consider this a 👍 for their feedback 😄