When I was teaching assistant at University for Real Time Safety Critical Systems class this was one of the star assignments in the class. Instead of writing

When I was teaching assistant at University for Real Time Safety Critical Systems class this was one of the star assignments in the class. Instead of writing just a dummy program we built an actual elevator using servo motors and asked students to code using different logic 1. Single elevator 2. Double elevator 2. Double elevator with various kinds of optimizations (reduce the energy used v/s reduce the time for each passenger). All had to be done using embedded C on an ATMEGA processor. Then we let students do the exact same coding using Esterel where you essentially represent everything as the state diagram. It was so much fun for bother teachers as well as students because when you deal with real hardware suddenly the scope of problems goes beyond merely getting the logic right.