During the summer, some schools assign students take-home projects to make sure they retain the information that they learn at school. However, the mold that teachers use for the students usually tends to be incredibly dry, rendering the point of summer break projects ineffective. Instead, students should be able to design their own summer projects so they can personalize it, become more motivated to do it, and hold onto material better.

Student-designed summer projects can be tailored to fit their own needs. Students usually have various problems that teachers might not be able to notice while at school, such as having to take care of other people or working a job to support a family, so by giving out a pre-planned project to students, these issues can be overlooked. This can usually cause the student to get overworked and overwhelmed. Projects that are designed by teachers can group people into a single category, regardless of issues going on, which can interfere in their students' lives.

By having the students design their own project, it can be a lot easier for the student to complete the project. In addition, a large population of students each summer leave their hometown for break, introducing new obstacles that can hinder their ability to work on a pre-planned project. By designing their own project, students are able to plan ahead and work around those hurdles. This can make it easier to complete the project and further their learning.

Critics argue that rather than being more motivated to do a student-planned project, children tend to be less motivated because there is no sense of authority to force them to work. However, students are generally more interested in a project once it involves their input and allows for them to show their creativity. For example, a few years ago, a considerable portion of high school seniors at a nearby school, when offered the chance to do capstone, participated in doing capstone because it was designed by the student. Students would leap at the chance to take a few weeks off to do a project on whatever they liked because they were able to showcase their creativity and sense of individuality. However, all of that changed when capstone started becoming more teacher-based, where students had to pick a topic from a tiny list that focused on jobs. This caused less people to do capstone that year, because it restricted students. Student-designed projects motivate children and causes them to actually take an interest because they get to express themselves. By forcing students to perform a teacher-designed project, it becomes more of a chore to do, causing people to lose interest.

By letting teenagers and children create their own project, it also helps them retain and learn new information better. Many adolescents are usually more interested and more inclined to retain knowledge in something they like rather than something they are forced to do. By letting the students pick the project that they want to do, they become more partial to learning the assignment. For example, if a football player decided to do his or her project on the physics of weight distribution of the football, they would be more inclined to learn the topic because it's on a topic that they are interested in. By pushing them to do a project not of their interest, however, it can cause the student to become apathetic and to even ignore the project, causing them to stop learning over the long summer break. Moreover, by giving a cookie cutter teacher-designed project, kids are also able to cheat easily and get the assignment done without learning anything, which is counter intuitive to the point of the project. Scores of teens every year are able to cheat on numerous assignments like these. If the projects are based off of the opinions of the students, it's increasingly difficult to cheat, which makes them have to learn the topic. By letting the students pick and design their own project, they're able to retain and learn new information about the topic a lot better.

By letting the student design the summer project, it makes the project more effective, because students are able to tailor it to fit their own needs, become less apathetic to doing it, and also continue learning over the summer. By being able to fit it to their own needs, they can design their own assignment to overcome a multitude of obstacles that they face. In addition, by coming up with their own projects, students are more motivated to do it, because it gives them the ability to showcase their skills and creativity. Moreover, when students are able to create their own project, it gives them the ability to retain information and continue learning over the summer. By letting the student decide what they want to do for their project, students are able to achieve the point of what this project is about without making it seem like a chore.