I think Summer projects should be teacher designed rather than leaving the student to their own devices. For reasons like having an idea already set for the students, making it so the students don't get too lost, and if the teacher came up with the topic for the project then there's be more summer than work stuffs.

Now then, when an idea is already laid out for someone, it becomes faster for then to think of more ideas from the base of the first example. For book reports and the like, its already hard because you have to choose from a list of books that you probably don't want to read,* but it gives you a bit of simpleness to get to choose a book that is meant to be read during summer.

Now comes the topic of getting lost within your own thought as you try to think of an idea that wasn't preset for you already. Getting lost is inevitable in some cases, but when there's no prompt to start you off, it becomes a lot harder to follow up with good ideas.

When it's the teacher or school that comes up with essay prompts, you'll have a much easier time since it saves up time from your summer. Book report prompts are usually made so that they're going to take a while before you finish them; but since those all have prompts already set by the school, they don't take as long as they would.

The question that this prompt asks is vague as it is, but the fact that I wrote this much based off of that makes it seem less vague and more just difficult to interpret. Summer projects being teacher designed is what all students have gotten used to at this point in time; and it would be wrong to switch it up on the next generation of students to make them come up with their own ideas from nothing to base them off of.