Pirate Plunder is a puzzle game where the player must program a ship to collect coins and treasure using loops and functions. It was shown to be effective in teaching children to use 'custom blocks' for procedural abstraction in Scratch-based programming languages.

Pirate Plunder has been used by the Federal Center for Technological Education of Rio de Janeiro as part of their programming curriculum.

In the design and development of Pirate Plunder, we used the following approach:

• Data-first. Analytics and user tracking were essential in using Pirate Plunder for research and publishing results. We implemented data collection to explore how children used the game features and the block-based programming environment.
• Challenge-driven. We harnessed the latest game design and computational thinking research to design levels that introduce programming concepts in a way that is challenging but not frustrating.
• Motivational design. Motivation is vital in educational tools. Pirate Plunder implements a currency system that rewards the player for completing levels optimally. Players can then spend their currency to customise their avatar, and can compare their avatars and their progress on a shared screen.
• Translatable. Pirate Plunder implements translations in an extendable and reusable way, and is currently translated into English and Brazilian Portuguese.