It is not uncommon for students to choose to enjoy their summer free of learning and homework. Be that as it may, it is also not uncommon for students to go into the beginning of each school year confused and somewhat out of touch from all the knowledge they absorbed the prior year. To prevent this shedding of information, schools will assign summer projects to keep students cognitively engaged and stimulated. Although having teachers design the specifics of the summer projects could be beneficial for overall learning and adherence to required curriculum, having students design their own projects with a general guideline from the teachers could help stimulate creativity and result in more engaged students outside of school.

Having teachers design a rigid summer project would, admittedly, be beneficial in the sense that students would be learning, and hopefully retaining, essential information which would aid them going into the next school year. Teachers can view the curriculum designated by the state, which has been deemed important for students to learn, and could therefore create something for students to do over break which adheres to those specific guidelines. However, the problem which arises with this type of memorization based learning is that students will be more likely to do the bare minimum required in order to receive a decent grade, rather than being genuinely engaged in the content which they are given. In the fast paced school environment, it is evident that the greater majority of students habitually choose to do what is required in order to receive a grade, and genuine learning is becoming increasingly rare. Therefore, for a summer project which has the goal of getting students to be stimulated outside of a school environment, having a rigid teacher designed project is not the most beneficial route for student engagement.

If students were to design their own projects based off of personal interests, tied into information which would be beneficial for them to retain over the summer, it would subsequently increase student participation and passion in learning the given content. It is interesting to note that the education system routinely enforces fact-based learning without real world application and context. While students are already outside of a regular school environment, encouraging creative learning and sparking interest in the world around them, and giving context to facts, would be overall beneficial for cognitive development and stimulus, and would in turn be better understood and retained in students' minds for the coming school year. It is true that students would likely still be competing for a decent grade; however, having students design their own means of acheiving that grade based off of a general guideline would promote more interest and effort in how they spend their break from school. Students must be given the opportunity to engage their interests in the real world while remaining mentally stimulated.

Allowing students to design personalized projects would help reduce cheating and sharing of answers, with each person working towards their own interest and ideas of how to combine learning with passion. All too often, students resort to sharing answers with others and utilizing Google to complete basic tasks assigned by teachers, stunting genuine thought and creative ideas. Students quickly become memorizing machines, absorbing facts without context, than attempting to understand a lesson which teachers try to convey. However, if students were given the opportunity to complete a summer project which did not require mindless repetition of information, and rather the creative implications of something which interests them tied into what they must retain over the summer, it would greatly reduce cheating and sharing of answers. While being mentally stimulated, each project would be unique to the individual completing it, making the mere idea of cheating become obsolete.

The current system of education often stamps down creativity and passion for learning, and students become more absorbed in the concept of receiving a grade than they are in retaining crucial information being taught. Over the summer, students will shed the information learned in the prior school year, once it is deemed as being useless or obsolete. Creative, student-led summer projects would aid in changing this narrative of memorization, and promote genuine mental stimulus which individuals can become passionate about, merely based off of the direction teachers want students to go in. Rigid, dictated summer projects would not be beneficial for overall growth and passion for learning, and would only continue to drive the education system to creating mindless students, rather than learners.