BashDungeon: Learning UNIX with a video-game

We present here the first of a series of video-games designed for teaching fundamentals of computer science to university students. We built the game as an adventure inside a dungeon, which aims at reproducing the topology of a Unix file system. Inside the different rooms, the players can learn how to use several Unix commands, from simple file system actions to complex text manipulations, to complete the quests and win the game. We performed a user test on a class of B.Sc. students at the University of Cagliari. The results show a good acceptance of the game metaphor and its effectiveness in supporting the learning process. We plan to expand this game and to design similar games for teaching object-oriented programming and algorithms and data structures.