In this paper it is presented a Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) mobile robot programming approach, to be applied in a robotics educational context. The motivation to apply this approach is the fact that students can program the robots without access to the robot hardware, but still maintain some important closed loop control critical features, such as a realistic lag time and the possibility for a larger number of students to program at the same time. Therefore, the developed software is applied to the real hardware without any change. The HIL approach was applied to provide a simulation close to reality, once the processing occurs in the real robot processor and the actuation and sensorization inside the simulation, adding to the advantage to test the firmware avoiding damage in the physical robot.