Is it fair to have teachers design summer projects for students on break? During school, projects are normally done throughout the course to show a student's understanding of a subject. Most schools don't assign summer projects for the student body since summer is supposed to be the break time. Some schools do give out summer projects, but keep in mind, the projects themselves, despite being assigned during break, aren't usually designed by students. Summer projects should be student-designed because people work better with ideas they're familiar with, this gives students more freedom with subjects for a project, and students are more willing to do something they want to do or research.

When working on projects, its easier to work with something you're familiar with than anything else. Making a project on a familiar concept means students would be able to write more in-depth about it. They'd also be able to understand it better since looking something up doesn't always give you enough info about a subject. Imagine trying to write a in-depth analysis on Didgeridoos when you've never even heard of one or even have background information on instruments. Familiarity with your work makes it come to you naturally and having the freedom to choose the subject of a project is important.

Being able to choose what you're working with will make a project more enjoyable. Most of the time, teacher-assigned projects would have all the students doing or researching the same thing. While this makes the assignment easier to grade and gives everyone a common goal, some people want to look somewhere else. Choosing your subject could bring about interesting results and give you a new interest rather than just being given the generic science project where you monitor and grow a small plant for x amount of time. Working on something you, personally, picked out could also inspire you to put more work into the assignment.

Being willing to do your work helps greatly with work ethic and attitude towards the work. Researching a subject that interests you, rather than something else, would make anyone more productive. There are lots of ideas people would look further into if prompted and this would be that prompt. Students would be able to enjoy looking up information on subjects interesting to them and put them on paper. They'd be able to turn in a well-written paper and get a good grade just for researching a fun subject.

In conclusion, having students create their own summer projects would be highly beneficial towards productivity on said project. The benefits outweight the negatives and more students would work harder on these projects. Being limited to certain ideas will make it so students don't try as hard to think outside the box. This type of work also helps students find things they're interested in for later. All of these things would help them work better and earn better results, but they'd also find more information and learn better this way and isn't that the point of all this?