This paper describes a study of teaching a programming language in a C programming course by having students assemble and program a low-cost mobile robot. Writing their own programs to define the robot's behavior raised students' motivation. Working in small groups, students programmed the robots by using the control structures of structured programming. Over the course, there was a significant improvement in students' academic performance and motivation. The approach took into account four of the motivational factors that feature in the ARCS model: (1) attention; (2) relevance; (3) confidence; and (4) satisfaction. The main achievements of the approach were to be able to: (1) catch and hold students' attention throughout the course; (2) increase students' confidence in the learning process; (3) achieve a high student satisfaction level with their acquired skills; and (4) demonstrate to students the practical usefulness of the knowledge they had learned. This paper also determines the extent to which this strategy was effective in meeting the teaching goals.