The fast evolution of technologies forces teachers to
trade content off for self-learning. PBL is one of the best ways
to promote self-learning and simultaneously boost motivation. In
this paper, we present our experience introducing project-based
learning in the last year subject. New Internet of Things (IoT) topic
allows us to carry out complete projects, integrating different
technologies and tools. Moreover, the selection of open-source and
standard free technologies makes easy and cheap the access to
hardware and software platforms used. We carefully have picked
communication, data management, and programming tools that
we think would be attractive to our students. They can start
making fast prototyping with little initial skills and, at the same
time, these are serious and popular tools widely used in the
industry. In this paper, we report on the design of a project-based
learning for our course and the impact this has on the
student satisfaction and motivation. Surveys taught us that tuning
the courses towards developing real projects on the field, has a
large impact on acceptance, learning objectives achievements and
motivation towards the course content.