How to motivate students in project based learning

Educational thinking in higher education has undergone a rapid change. The ability to remember facts loses importance whereas the capability to solve problems becomes more and more the main focus of teaching. At the Technikum Wien Project Based Learning (PBL) was introduced in various subjects of our IT course. The basic approach of PBL originated from the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands where it is reported to be highly successful [1] [2] [3] [4]. The specific problem the authors tried to solve, deals with the motivation of students. The main motivation of students is - of course - to achieve good test results and only the lesser focus lies on the specific contents of the subject. The authors tried to develop a method, which allows the students to focus their intrinsic motivation onto the study project itself and not onto the extrinsic motivation, namely test results. [5]