Served as a Teaching Assistant for Rust programming courses, guiding 50-60 first-year students through systems programming concepts and Rust's unique ownership model.
Teaching Focus
Rust Fundamentals
Supervised lab sessions covering Rust's core concepts including ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes. These concepts proved challenging for students new to systems programming, requiring clear explanations and practical examples.
Helped students understand Rust's memory safety guarantees and how they differ from traditional programming languages like C and C++.
Lab Management
Facilitated hands-on programming sessions where students worked through Rust exercises and projects. The language's strict compiler provided immediate feedback, which became a valuable teaching tool for demonstrating proper programming practices.
Student Assessment
Evaluated homework submissions, lab assignments, and examination papers, focusing on both code correctness and understanding of Rust's ownership principles. Provided detailed feedback to help students grasp the language's unique approach to memory management.
Unique Challenges
Teaching Rust to first-year students presented distinct challenges compared to traditional programming languages. The ownership system and borrow checker required students to think differently about memory management from the start.
This experience improved my ability to break down complex programming concepts and explain Rust's safety features in accessible terms.
Impact
Working with Rust strengthened my own understanding of systems programming principles while developing skills in explaining advanced concepts to programming beginners. The role demonstrated how modern languages can teach good programming habits from the foundation level.