Teaching first-year university students or high schoolers to use a Unix shell is not always the easiest or most entertaining of tasks. GameShell was devised as a tool to help students at the Université Savoie Mont Blanc to engage with a real shell, in a way that encourages learning while also having fun.
The original idea, due to Rodolphe Lepigre, was to run a standard bash session with an appropriate configuration file that defined “missions” which would be “checked” in order to progress through the game.