text: Let's begin with the obvious advantage: students will love it compared to what the teacher assigns, which has pedagogical benefits because students are more ambitious and engaged. This is mostly due to the fact that students can choose the things that better relate to their interests. They become interested in both the project and the relevant part of the curriculum. Applying the information you learned in previous school year is an excellent way to test what you've learned - and applying it to something you genuinely care about is the best test of your understanding. Also, people must be interested in a project before they can be enthusiastic (or willing at the least) to engage with the it, and everyone knows that engagement is a good thing for learning. Students incorporating something into their break makes them even more likely to do it, a fact that has had especially important bearing for me this last year, where it's been challenging to stay on top of the workload. The few times I've taken some days off to relax, I noticed that it was comparatively really difficult to get myself to do stuff when starting again. I feel even more apprehensive if I get out of the habit entirely. It's simple: when you give a student a break, they're more likely to engage in school projects if they feels like a part of their break, so not only does letting students design their own projects provide quality, but quantity. Here's an example which fits perfectly with what I'm saying: I walked into my History of the Americas class at the beginning of the year, and many of my peers who were top students had not finished reading the books they were assigned during the summer and fudged the details on the accompanying paper. When listening to them, the most common remarks were about how dry and uninteresting the prescribed book list was and how having to do it in the summer was an annoyance that they just wanted to put off. Meanwhile, most student-designed projects I know of provide much better learning and motivation. The biggest example I've in my mind when writing this is my experience with the I'm in the IB program, where students are required to complete an