As a student, one of the worst situations is one where an assignment is given that is unclear, vague, or otherwise difficult to understand. Completing projects is usually a laborsome enough activity on its own, but when the question or prompt is incomprehensible, it turns a small hill of a task into a mountain of one. Too many students have been in this situation and know what it is like to be immeasurably confused and frustrated because the assignment is too difficult to interpret. To make matters worse, students quite often do not know how to contact their teachers during the summer, so they are given no help or clarity as to what they are supposed to do. To avoid this, as well as a multitude of other issues, summer projects should be designed by the students, because they understand how to design the project to make it more ideal, it will allow the students to have more control over which direction the project is taken, and it would also benefit the teachers by stopping them from having to do even more work.

Different people can take different pieces of information away from the same things. Sometimes people will pick up on completely different parts of text than others would. This should not be an issue, but when a teacher is pushing for students to make a project from one angle or perspective, it could prove very restricting since they did not form the same viewpoint on the information. By designing their own projects, students could eliminate this obstacle and just create something based on what they took away from their learning. This would help students to be much more creative and would allow them to properly highlight what they learned. One could argue that this is counter intuitive since students would not all have the takeaway the teacher wants them to gain, but summer projects are once again just about assuring that students are learning and usually not followed up on as true assignments. The question of if a student learned the same thing as everyone else should not be as important as them just learning something relevant in general.

Giving students control over what they do for a summer project could greatly benefit their learning. By requiring them to design the project themselves, students are then also required to step up to the plate and be more responsible and creative. Learning to develop these characteristics is far more important than any history or science lesson their project may be on. As stated earlier, summer projects are usually not followed up on, making students even more likely to forget what they learned about from them. And at the very least, making the projects student-designed would save teachers from having to do it themselves, which they would most likely appreciate since they are already given enough work as is.