text: Student-designed projects provoke a stronger understanding of a topic because students spend time garnering information and relating it with current events. For example, incoming A.P. Spanish students need to familiarize themselves with content which relates to the themes covered in the class. They may design a poster for each theme by organizing current events under an example column and summarizing the most pertinent details found from their research. Student-designed projects benefit students because students are inspired to conduct research on the topic, and students are not limited to guidelines. They promote a higher capacity for creativity because students expand beyond the parameters of the subject and force students to actively engage with the project. The flexibility of student-designed projects can cover a topic more comprehensive than teacher-designed projects because they stretch beyond just the bare bones of a topic. Semantic encoding, the act of obtaining memories by relating information directly to the source, increases retention time because the students grapple with the topic, and they encode the information to long-term memory. By storing the information in long-term memory, students can prolong the retention curve, a graph that depicts an increase in memory loss as time increases.