Teaching programming using dedicated Arduino Educational Board

This paper presents a new approach to teaching programming to undergraduate computer science students. A dedicated Arduino board along with custom application programming interface (API) was introduced into programming classes with a view to strengthen students' engagement and improving the attractiveness of the course. The students were presented with basic functionalities of the board, which gave them a possibility to accomplish their own projects-typically video games-without any background in electronics. The level of engagement of the participants was observed by the tutors during classes and also reviewed based on questionnaires filled by 347 first-, second-, and third-year undergraduates. The results indicated that the proposed approach was well received by nearly 80%, while nearly 75% of the participants expressed a wish to continue their Computer Science education using Arduino.