Nowadays, many empirical studies are carried out based on educational projects. In these cases, instructors put forward requirements on educational projects from the perspective of education, and researchers also provide their requirements from the perspective of empirical study. How to design educational projects successfully from both educational perspective and research perspective becomes a practical challenge. In this paper, we present a successful case to resolve this problem: we designed two educational projects in a software architecture course, based on which an empirical study about creativity in software development was carried out. Our methods to design these educational projects can be reused for other software engineering courses associated with empirical study.