This first section is focused entirely on getting the necessary tools set up. All developer tools are a pain to set up and not allocating an entire 90 minute session to do so would be naive and disastrous.
This is going to be the hardest class to keep all the students at the same pace. We'll be encouraging any students who are stuck in the process to ask for help and those who are too shy to do so, make sure they don't flail and that they're making progress.
For those who do finish early, we have a set of Lua exercises which you should definitely do when they're ready so you're prepared to answer questions.
The introductory explanation of Lua is here for now: http://coderdojosv.github.io/mobile-games/section-00/docs/introduction.html
Encourage the students to move to the exercises once they've played through the Hello game a few times. The Lua exercises are distributed and run using repl.it because Corona doesn't ship with a usable standalone Lua interpreter and the overhead of setting one up is too high for a single night's work.
The absolute worst part of the experience for folks starting out with Corona on iOS devices is getting the certs in place. For one, it's needlessly expensive just to play around and the process is arcane even by developer standards. To spare the students from this, the lead instructor should create an Apple Developer account specifically for their Dojo to use and pay the $99 fee once per Dojo per year per one hundred devices.
The students need two things to build and install apps on their iOS device.
- An Apple Signed developer cert
- A provisioning profile installed on their device
The lead instructor will provide both of these to every student.
The Corona SDK docs on provisioning and building iOS were my primary source for doing all this stuff.
It is going to be a lot easier to generate a single provisioning profile for all apps and all devices used by a dojo than it will be to try and isolate them. This means we miss out on stuff like iCloud storage but we're cross-platform with Android anyway so we're not sacrificing much.
At the first session, have each student bring forth their device and USB cable, collect their UDID using XCode or iTunes and add it to the Apple developer account.
Once all student devices have been collected, create a wildcard app provisioning profile and make sure you select every UDID.
Download the provisioning profile and save it to a USB drive with the developer cert.
Use the USB drive to distribute this to each iOS student, install the cert by
double clicking on it and put the provisioning profile in
~/Library/MobileDevice/Provisioning Profiles
There's basically no better way to do this because of Apple's rules. Students can continue to use these profiles for up to a year after the course is finished but will be unable to add new devices to the provisioning profiles unless they track down the lead instructor or whoever has the credentials. If they wish to submit applications to the app store or create apps to distribute to their friends' devices, they'll need to convince someone to pony up the $99 and go through the cert/provisioning gauntlet.