Life’s too short to not play with scala. You've got the easiest way to learn it. Just edit the scrapbook.scala file and refresh this page; it will execute the Scrapbook class and display all results of print(…) calls here.
New to scala? Here is a set of resources that will help you start:
If you think playing with scala is fun, wait until you start coding a real web application with it. Play! framework is the easiest way to create a web application with Java and it has a scala module.