Positive experience of the project gamification in the microprocessors and Microcontrollers course

Hardware-based courses require a lot of practical work during lab exercises, so students can achieve the learning outcomes more easily. Additionally, instructors expect the students to work on practical projects, which are more challenging and where students must use knowledge of several learning areas. Both lab exercises and projects should be interesting for the students, especially for computer science students, which usually do not prefer the hardware-based courses. This paper presents the new approach of the project gamification in the hardware-based course Microprocessors and Microcontrollers for computer science students. This change significantly improved the course - not only that it improved the average grade of the passed students, but it provoked the students to enroll the other hardware courses of the upper semesters. Even more so, some diploma theses involving microcontrollers were developed for the first time.