How to select a course project for IT students?

Question

IT education

Efficiency will be when there is involvement and the problem being solved becomes relevant.

But everything is already written and even this is not used.

Everyone knows that all courses sin with copy-paste of previous projects of graduates. On the one hand, this is an opportunity to compare your work.

And how to choose a task according to the demanded interest of the student?

Answer 1

Students should be given the opportunity to choose their own assignments.

Answer 2

If the goal of the course is learning: set the task, the result of which the student can then use to optimize his work in the future (I'm talking about recursive development methods).

And how to choose a task according to the demanded interest of the student?

Example: I want to create a game.
And you - ok, but it's trite ... Much better - just a tournament server for any games!