Soermirno Kartosoewito first announced his slot at the Devnology Community Day as an introduction to Smalltalk. Later on he morphed it into a workshop that would give the participants the chance of a first hand experience with Smalltalk. Ernest Micklei provided his game server and the participants were invited to write a client to that game server. The goal of the game was to control a tank in a battlefield. The battlefield was projected with a beamer as shown in the photo.

The squares that look like bricks are bricks and the other ones depict the tanks. The participants all got a prepared Pharo installation that had already parts of the client implemented and a handout with the task to complete. The Smalltalk first-timers were supported by a number of experienced Smalltalkers, including myself, to overcome any difficulty they might run into. One gave up, others did very well.

Some 80 people attended the Devnology Community Day. It had 4 tracks and the workshop got a fair share of attendees. It was really cool to get people to know (more) about Smalltalk like this. The only downer is that the game server is not available on-line, so people can't continue to work on their client if they want to.

More photos of the workshop here.