Help a Noob in trouble

You can indeed use a DE0 to drive motors, by not by itself. FPGA pins are logic levels. They aren't designed to provide enough power to run motors etc. You will need a simple motor driving circuit (diode + transistor + resisters) There are several tutorials for driving motors off of microcontroller GPIOs. The same principles should apply to an FPGA. Make sure you understand the principles involved. Don't just blindly use the values the tutorials use. Do the calculations based on the output current limit of the FPGA pins. It's very easy to blow the outputs on your FPGA (you might have done so already).