text: More often than not, student-designed projects entail open exploration of a plethora of topics. While this can sometimes be beneficial, such open interpretation leads to less directed focus on the actual cirriculum, making the student-designed approach less effective than the teacher-designed counterpart. My computer science teacher assigned such a flawed project during this past summer, requiring students to merely explore and document anything computer related and create a project based on the findings. While such a project took student interest into account, it had little to no focus on the actual coding and programming cirriculum of the course. If my teacher had assigned us a project that required gaining a decent and basic understanding of code instead of an open ended exploration, we would have likely gained far more knowledge relevant to the course and a better idea of what the course's focus would be.