During the summer, students are given a plethora of work by their teacher for the upcoming school year to ensure that students are able to recall and apply their knowledge over the summer. Unfortunately, many of these projects and assignments are teacher-designed and lack the ability to properly ensure the retention of information over the summer. Instead, over-break projects should be student-designed as this would help students learn and memorize information better, make students have a more interactive experience, and make each student have a unique project based off their specific needs as a learner.

The unique nature of student-created assignments allows the student that creates their own project to have better retention of the material covered by the project due to a psychological concept using episodic memory. This psychological concept is a proven memory technique that uses personal experiences (episodic memories) as a link to the concept or term the individual is trying to learn and remember. This can easily be applied to the homework given over their break as when students design their own projects they are able to make mental links with the project components and the information they are doing a project on. These links allow them to be able to retain the information better as they have memory to draw back on when they think about the concept. Unlike this, however, teacher-designed projects have many students mindlessly doing their homework; thus, missing the connections with the experience and the concept. While, with student-designed projects they are forced to think about the concepts and project links as they create and complete the assignment.

Student-created projects also tend to be more interactive as it forces the student to engage with the project in through its interesting components. I have experiences with both sides of the argument as I am a high school student; this has caused me to partake in both teacher-made assignments and student-created projects. Overall, I have noticed that the teacher-made assignments tend to be more dry and more like busy work, rather than student-based assignments which are more interactive as they incorporate games, colorful activities and modern slang sprinkled throughout the assignment. This makes the work much more enjoyable for students as they are able to have fun doing the work. This also helps them retain information better as they are focusing on the work yet still enjoying it rather than mindlessly doing the work because you were told to do it. These fun, interactive activities are both fun for the user but also achieves the end goal of stimulating the student's knowledge over summer break.

While also interactive, student-created assignments are also unique to each student. Students understand their weakness and will be able to create a project that is catered to them and their specific strengths and weaknesses in order to better their current knowledge of the subject. For example, Generic_Name has trouble on cardiology for her AP Biology class; so for her project over the summer she focused on the anatomy of the heart and the blood circulation process of the human body. This allowed Generic_Name an opportunity to research and study cardiology and other heart-related processes, thus increasing her knowledge of her weakest subject within AP Biology. Therefore, every single student is given the opportunity to fix their individual flaws through these student-made projects. On the other hand, a standardized teacher-made assignment barely addresses their weaknesses. This is due to the fact that teacher-made assignments are generalized to all students and only brush the surface of every topic in order to cram all the information onto the one assignment. While conversely, student-made assignments are able to go deep into concepts the student struggles with due to the student being able to create the project.

Student-created projects have the ability to increase the knowledge of the material covered by the project, dramatically. It also gives the student a more pleasurable experience compared to a teacher-created assignment due to its interactive nature and more student catered experience through games and activities. However, the most important aspect of student-created projects is its ability to be a unique assignment that is perfectly created to address the needs and wants of that student as it is the student in question that is creating it. These three characteristics of student-created projects allows the student to grasp and retain the important information they need to learn and remember over the summer. It is my understanding that the student, the person who knows what they need to learn, should be given a project that caters to them and gives them the best opportunity to learn and remember information through a medium that allows them to understand the concept without getting bored of it. So why choose these standardized teacher-created assignments that are unable to meet the specific needs of its students? Why not go for the better option that allows students to flourish in their own creative and unique way?