As a child, I, as well as most others, desperately counted the days until summer break. In the classroom, we had a bright, beach themed poster board with the school days remaining plastered in big, bold letters in the middle. On my sports teams, we always had fun and easy practices during the last week of school. I always looked forward to summer, especially when everyone else was so enthusiastic about it. However, this changed as I got older when I was introduced to summer assignments. They felt like the exact opposite of summer. They were boring and restrictive, so I always procrastinated doing them until the very end. Today, many school systems are looking to implement summer projects, as they can help tackle the lost and wasted time during the summer. Simultaneously, it is important that schools don't impose overly restrictive projects that take away what it means to be on summer break. One solution to this is to implement student-designed projects. These allow students to create what they want their summer project to be. Although many may say teacher-designed summer projects better preserve the students' learning, student-designed projects are overall superior because they give more freedom, creativity, and flexibility for the students during their summer break.

Student-designed summer projects are a phenomenal chance to give students more freedom and let them be creative. In school, students have very few opportunities to express their creativity, so summer break is seen by many as a chance to break away from overly structured school days. Forcing students to follow a teacher-designed project will only remove its specialty, and further limit chances students have to be creative. On the other hand, student-designed projects could be the spark needed by some to make use of their summer. Additionally, if students feel the teacher-designed projects were too restrictive, there is a chance they would put as little effort into them as possible, or forgo them entirely. If this happens, it is a waste of time for both the student and the teacher. In my own experience, I have seen that most summer assignments had very little or no impact on my grade, so it often made far more sense not to do them. However, when teachers did try to tie these assignments to a grade, lots of students and parents complained. Whereas, when students are able to design a project about something they are passionate about, this is far less likely to happen, and could even lead to further interest about that topic.

Another important aspect of summer projects is the various time restraints every student has. Students may have sports, vacations, jobs, and many other activities. Designing a project which accommodates everyone's complex and ever-changing needs can be impossible. By allowing students to design the project, much of this problem is eliminated. They know the time they have better than anyone else, so they can design a project which fits far better to their own schedule. If students were able to design their own projects, they could even tie it into the activities they're already doing. This way, they're able to gain the benefits of a summer project, while not having to change much about their summer. Not having enough time is another reason why some students may not do their summer project, but can have other, additional, consequences. With a teacher-designed project, if students don't have the time to complete it, they may look towards cheating off of others, since everyone is following the same project. This not only negates any benefits of a summer project, but can also lead to some downsides. If a student cheats on a summer project because they didn't have the time to do it, they may feel encouraged to cheat again in the future, even if they wouldn't have otherwise. With a student-designed project, cheating is much less of a problem. Not only are there far fewer reasons to cheat, but it's much harder to as well, since every student has their own project, they can't simply copy off of what someone else has done.

Many people may say that teacher-designed projects would be far better to maintain students' learning and allow them to learn new things, but this is untrue. It is far easier for students to learn new things if it's about a topic they're interested about; whereas, students may not absorb any knowledge about a topic they have no interest in. Even if student-designed projects were worse for learning, their other benefits still outweigh their downsides. Student-designed projects are a great way to develop creativity, and they let students with naturally high creativity use it, which they aren't given many chances to in school. Student-designed projects are also much better for students' time constraints, which will encourage more students to do the project.

As more school systems begin to adopt summer projects, it is crucial that these projects are student-designed. Summer projects are important to build and preserve learning from throughout the year, but are extremely limiting on students freedom, creativity, and flexibility. By giving students the capability to design their own projects, it restores much of what is lost by giving them summer work. Student-designed projects also help to avoid many of the possible downsides of teacher-designed ones. Because of the lack of freedom and the inability to tailor a project to everyone schedule, teacher-designed projects can often lead to students cheating, or not doing the work at all. By putting students in the driver's seat of their own project, they can find a project that is enjoyable and encourages themselves to do it. By using student-designed projects, schools can obtain the needed balanced between a useful summer and an enjoyable one.