Abstract:

This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a project-based and gamified teaching framework for an introductory Arduino course in undergraduate education. The innovation was introduced in response to three recurrent challenges: low student engagement in isolated laboratory sessions, difficulties in connecting programming and electronics concepts to meaningful artefacts, and limited student reflection on their own learning process.

The proposed framework reorganised the course around short development sprints in which student teams designed, implemented and iteratively improved functional Arduino-based prototypes. The intervention combined project-based learning, formative assessment, lightweight gamification, portfolio-based evidence collection, peer assessment, and structured rubrics for both technical and transversal skills. Special attention was paid to teamwork, progressive feedback and the visibility of learning evidence throughout the course.

The study follows a practice-based research approach and reports evidence from the implementation in a real undergraduate setting. Data sources include project artefacts, rubric scores, student portfolios, peer-assessment records, teacher observation, and student perception surveys. The evaluation focuses on engagement, perceived usefulness, quality of prototypes, collaboration, and students’ capacity to connect theory with practice.

Results show that organising the course around iterative projects and visible milestones contributed to a more active and sustained involvement, improved the quality of student artefacts, and supported the development of self-regulation and collaborative problem-solving. The paper also discusses the feasibility of the model for regular teaching conditions and its transferability to other introductory STEM and educational robotics contexts. The experience may be of interest to instructors seeking practical and scalable ways to integrate active learning, gamification and authentic assessment in engineering education.

Keywords:

Project-based learning, Gamification, Arduino, Engineering education.