  Pulsating stars, such as Cepheids and RR Lyrae, offer us a window to measure
and study changes due to stellar evolution. In this work, we study the former
by calculating a set of evolutionary tracks of stars with an initial mass of 4
to 7 $M_\odot$, varying the initial rotation rate and metallicity, using the
stellar evolution code Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA).
Using Radial Stellar Pulsations (RSP), a recently added functionality of MESA,
we obtained theoretical instability strip (IS) edges and linear periods for the
radial fundamental mode. Period-age, period-age-temperature, period-luminosity,
and period-luminosity-temperature relationships were derived for three rotation
rates and metallicities, showing a dependence on crossing number, position in
the IS, rotation, and metallicity. We calculated period change rates (PCRs)
based on the linear periods from RSP. We compared our models with literature
results using the Geneva code, and found large differences, as expected due to
the different implementations of rotation between codes. In addition, we
compared our theoretical PCRs with those measured in our recent work for Large
Magellanic Cloud Cepheids. We found good overall agreement, even though our
models do not reach the short-period regime exhibited by the empirical data.
Implementations of physical processes not yet included in our models, such as
pulsation-driven mass loss, an improved treatment of convection that may lead
to a better description of the instability strip edges, as well as
consideration of a wider initial mass range, could all help improve the
agreement with the observed PCRs.
