Experiences from a Scalatron workshop (with local IDE setups)

[Scalatron]

For the record, here are some real life experiences from a live-coding workshop with Scalatron for 10 Java programmers with no prior experience in Scala. 

Note that this workshop was conducted in early March 2012, before the browser-based Scalatron IDE was available - everyone had to install a full build environment locally.

With the newer version available now (end of April 2012), setup is much simpler and a much shorter (2-4 hour) workshop is feasible.

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Because people had no prior experience with Scala and setup was expected to take 35-60 minutes, the workshop was planned for about 7 hours total on a Sunday. 

People showed up at 11 with their laptops. Everyone pulled the basic materials off a USB drive: Typesafe stack, IntelliJ, Scalatron package. A Mac mini (1GB RAM, 2 CPUs) ran the

game server. The main game window was projected on a wall above the group, with a lone example bot exploring the arena.

Getting everyone's IDE set up and connected to the network share took about 45 minutes. The organizer then provided a 10 minute oral overview of Scala, the game setup and game rules and the structure of the tutorial - on purpose without a canned presentation and extremely brief.

By noon, everyone was coding - coffee, tea and cookies providing fuel. At 12:30, everyone had their first bot appear in the projected arena. People were really engaged and furiously working through the examples in the tutorial to make progress. By the time pizza arrived at 1:30pm, several programmers had bots hunting beasts and harvesting the edible plants. As the most experienced Scala programmer (even though I consider myself a relative newbie) I walked the room to help people find and fix bugs, to explain some of the more involved Scala constructs and occasionally to suggest simple functional alternatives to procedural code.

The "official part" wrapped up at around 5:30pm. Almost everyone had a pretty reasonable bot in the running; only one developer, who jumped right into the (relatively complex) source code of the reference bot instead of working through the tutorial got a bit lost in the underscores. But everyone was happily excited, with people discussing the code they wrote and talking about their bot tactics and promising to send me the bots they'd come up with over the coming week. You know, red-cheek excited about having learned a neat new thing and having built something that works and having spent lots of time talking about cool technical stuff with other smart people. More like a hack-a-thon than a classical training session.

And somehow Scala, instead of being yet another thing that one has work on and learn, had become a tool that people acquired naturally because they were keen on solving some problem and Scala simply provided the answer. At bit like this: almost no-one wants to learn about skis as such, but many people do want to ski.

And everyone took home a fully configured IDE and build setup and enough ideas and materials to keep them engaged when they got home.