text: Summer projects should be designed by students because students are more likely to enjoy the topics they pick, which will lead to better work. Many elementary schools teach using Problem-Based Learning projects during the school year, where young students are assigned a problem and are allowed to be as imaginative with their solutions as they like. The results of these projects are typically several hundred years ahead of humanity's current abilities and are borderline impossible to achieve, but the students are always fully engaged in the work and spend ample time cooperating with their peers, applying critical thinking skills, and much more. These students prove that self-directed projects will provide a great amount of opportunity to learn what is more important than a theoretical solution to global warming: how to work well with others and think through problems in order to solve them. Projects designed by students will maximize student engagement and ultimately result in better grades.