Yeah, it's the dynamic interactivity that I was looking for. I'm afriad console IO isn't a starter here. I'm sure it's fine as a console IO example, but it's just a completely different class of thing.
I'm actually a huge proponent of learning through text type games in lieu of more complicated graphics related black boxes where someone is essentially letting a library do 98% of the work. A text game is literally as simple as it gets while requiring no modules (well maybe IO or system if your language doesn't include it by default). Guess my number also is seems more mathematical although that is just subjective rubbish on my part ;). I do believe you're correct that certain people would like a graphical introduction more. Maybe you could write a cool intro to Rust with graphics!
I think the issue isn't text versus complicated graphics, it's that the only thing you can do with most standard libraries is buffered line I/O, which doesn't feel like directly controlling anything. If you could just read the actual keyboard and poke some letters into a 2D text array, it would enable a whole different kind of interaction.
Polling the keyboard and using something like ncurses can work. I've implemented console Tetris in an hour using just those tools, and you get to write a game loop, rather than being called back by a framework like most GUI setups.
