One of the first most fundamental skills that freshman engineering students learn is computational thinking. Computation thinking is the thought process carried out to solve problems. To develop this skill set usually computer programming fundamentals are introduced using a specific programming language. This approach falls short in sustaining the students’ interest in engineering. To rekindle the students’ interest in engineering, we proposed the utilization of the open-source electronics prototyping platform “Arduino”. Introducing the students to hardware programming and having them use project-based approaches to develop their computational thinking skill set increased their interest in the subject matter and significantly improved their performance.