Although the primary purpose of summer break is to allow students to relax and not worry about rigorous courses, some schools require that students complete summer projects so they can maintain the academic mindset they had during the school year in preparation for the upcoming year. While these projects ensure that students keep their brains working during the break, the types of projects that are assigned to them is an important factor towards whether the students are benefiting or being hindered by them. These "types" of projects could either be teacher-designed or student-designed, each providing their own benefits and drawbacks. Putting these two against one another, the teacher-designed projects provide students with greater advantages than the student-designed projects, and the disadvantages of the former are not as critical as the latter.

Teacher-designed projects are preferable over student-designed projects because of the prior experience teachers might have with completing summer projects when they were in school. They will already have an idea on the kind of projects that will benefit students the most based on the projects they believe helped them the most when they were students. For example, if a teacher completed a summer project for a specific subject, they immensely enjoyed doing it, and they performed better in the subject in the following school year because of it, they would design a project similar to the one that improved their performance because it has been proven that that kind of project allows students to develop and improve their skills so they can be more than prepared for the next school year. The same applies with the contrary situation: if teachers had to complete a summer project that they thought was boring, uninteresting, or just did not get their brains working, then they would take note that that is not the kind of project they should be assigning their students since they would likely develop the same opinions about it. In short, teachers having past experience regarding summer projects is crucial in order to provide students with the most desirable projects that can best maintain their academic mindsets over the break.

With the amount of years teachers have spent learning and building up their teaching education in school and college, they will have more credibility than most when it comes to proposing ideas, in this case summer project designs, to the school board. The main purpose of the school board is to give students the best school environment and experience, but that does not simply apply to only during the academic school year; they want to find ways to guarantee that students continue to successfully learn all year round so their education level continues to grow all the way until they graduate. The board has the largest say when it comes to approving ideas related to the schools in their designated area, so teachers could go to them and request for their approval on their project idea. The school board would trust that the teacher thoughtfully designed a logical project, so they might request that specific testing be performed to see how good of an idea it is before accepting it. If it is accepted after testing, then that provides the teacher with extra verification that their project idea will benefit the students during their break from school. If anyone else (aside from other members of the school board,) proposed an idea for summer project, it would likely be more difficult for the board to consider their idea because they would have less credibility regarding their teaching experience, and the board would not want to risk wasting their time on some unproven person's idea. Therefore, teacher-designed projects are the ones that greatly benefit from the approval of the school board to ensure that student will maintain their skills in the best way possible.

However, with all these advantages that teacher-designed projects have, some people believe that student-designed projects have more benefits, and that is understandable. Possibly the most important reason why some believe that student-designed projects are better is that these students creating the projects are designing them based off of their peers. Being their peers, these students are more aware and can better comprehend the kind of mindsets that they have than teachers and adults in general. This is because the way generations are taught changes immensely, and it has been proven that teaching methods have greatly altered over the past few decades. For example, with the drastically increasing presence of technology, many teachers today are using technology as a huge part of their teaching, which is a great difference compared to a mere decade ago when technology was barely utilized in the classroom. However, being students, they run into a similar problem that adults who are not teachers have when proposing ideas to the school board: they do not have the credibility. Some students might believe they understand their peers better than the teachers understand them, but they are still students whom do not have the proper education to design projects for other students. The fact that mere students could immensely impact the way their peers perform in school is baffling because it should be the teachers' job to design projects for the future generation of adults, not the students whom have so much more to learn like their peers. It is the teachers that proven they are capable of creating things that can change and benefit the way that young students learn and maintain their skills.

It should always be up to the teachers to design summer projects for students. They better understand the curriculum based on experience, and they have the extra approval of the school board when they propose their ideas. The students that still want to design projects for other students will eventually get the opportunity to do so; that is what attending college to further build up their education is for.