A Tale of Teaching Rust by Andrew Brinker Rust has a reputation of having a very steep learning curve, but is this reputation justified? In this talk I share my experiences teaching Rust to a group of 26 undergraduates as part of a class on programming language theory. None of the students knew Rust going in. Most knew only one language. I walk through the key concepts from Rust that programmers in all languages can use, and that language designers may want to steal, and I talk about how this class of fledgling programmers handled and understood those concepts, what they think of Rust now, and what all of this might mean for teaching Rust effectively in the future.