Damo's Quest: A Gamified Environment for Learning Programming

The teaching of programming in primary and secondary education has once again revealed the heterogeneity of the ways in which students learn and instructors teach such a capability. Language barriers and technological skills of the involved people are some of the factors that affect the usability and usefulness of educational programming environments. This article presents a gamified programming environment, called Damo's Quest, that supports middle school instructors while they teach programming to students who have little access to computer technology and proficiency in English language. The platform offers a gamified-educational experience, in which students must deal with challenges in fantasy stories (in virtual worlds) by programming various solutions. The usability and perceived usefulness of the first version of this tool have been evaluated by two researchers, who are experts in computational thinking. Although preliminary, the results are highly encouraging.