The fast growing complexity and short time-to-market of embedded systems designs, besides the great increase in capacity of today?s chips, are mobilizing the industry towards to the development of System-on-Chip (SoC) solutions and platform based designs. However, as the complexity of such systems grows, the problems associated with the integration of the IP-cores necessary to form the system arise as a major problem in the design flow. In a case study approach, based on robotics, teaching students the synthesis design flow in a rapid prototyping platform for SoCs, provides them the understanding and skills they need to perform such function in their subsequent employment. This paper describes a design flow, for a project-oriented course, to help designers to gain productivity by using the SoC approach on FPGAs, while avoiding integration problems by introducing automatic tools. This methodology has been used in under-graduate and graduate digital system design classes.