Many schools incorporate summer learning into their students' curriculum to have them maintain knowledge gained throughout the school year. Although these projects are thought to be beneficial for students, the topics and activities given by teachers are often strenuous, and frankly, uninteresting to students, especially during their summer break. Summer projects assigned to kids should be allowed to be student designed to fit the student's interests, keep the child engaged, and to promote responsibility when constructing a project.

As a child grows, so do their interests and beliefs. Allowing student designed projects means letting them take control and organizing their own thoughts in which they see fit. By letting kids create a project based on their interests, it enables them to stay engaged on what they are working on, and to be able to put in their best effort and ideas into their assignment. A child's own ideas would mean better grades and a better concept of the topic they have chosen.

Students must be taught responsibility, and by allowing them to create their own rubrics, guidelines, and ideas, it promotes creativity and a sense of control in a child's mind. By allowing this flexibility of guidelines and rules, kids can stretch their ideas further without having to feel they have gone off-topic because it will be designed by them.

Although some might claim that teacher designed summer projects are more structured and educational for students, this is a flawed argument because most assignments given by teachers are strict and are only focused on a certain topic that not every student will take interest in. It's also important to give students a chance to be creative with their own guidelines and requirements, something that is restricted when a rubric designed to a teacher's expectations is given. Students would simply thrive more if handed an assignment they could create and build on their own.

In conclusion, schools should begin leaning more towards student designed summer assignments because of the immense freedom that is given and the responsibility that is required of students to create their own projects. It is important that from a young age, kids are able to write, discuss, and learn more about topics they are passionate about, and it is even more important that we do not limit their creativity because of the idea that projects should be teacher designed.