Abstract

Today the issue of providing effective education systems and motivate young people for entering higher education is crucial to be able to handle a more complex and global interconnected world with new challenges to meet and new problems to solve. Engineers are considered to have a key role in meeting many of these challenges. Thus, motivation as a driving force for learning, personal and professional development is important work with in Engineering Education. What motivates students and why, are there as many answers to as there are individuals. Still, due to different theories there seems to be some common prerequisites and traits in motivation. One of the foundations for motivation is the driving force to develop our identity and to fulfill our potentials. Hence, learning and personal development seems to be one of the basic human driving forces. Education and learning consequently ought to be one of the easiest activities to facilitate and still there are many challenges in education related to motivation and academic success. This paper explores how active learning can be used to facilitate motivation as a driving force for academic performance among students in Engineering Education. Being a work in progress, we report initial results from case study in Chile. Those initial results show that students’ engagement in the course is high, even if it is perceived as a highly demanding course, building on active learning methods.