text: Giving students the freedom to design their own projects also would insure that the project will be engaging and relevant to students in similar age groups. About a year ago, I went to a two-week engineering summer camp at a college I am interested in attending. There were students there from tenth through twelfth grade from all over the state, and the camp itself was actually run by a group of college students and a few professors. Over the course of the camp we learned all about engineering and future career fields we may be interested in, but we also were given an assignment. We had to design models of an Earth themed school in groups with the materials they provided before the end of the camp. To be honest, I had expected that we would have to take a test or fill out some questionnaire on what we had learned, given that we were at a college, so this was a nice surprise. Turns out that it was in fact the college students, and not the professors, who were in charge coming up with this project. Since they were not much older than us, they knew how to get us to apply the knowledge that we had learned in a way that we would enjoy. If all projects were done like this, I'm sure many of them would be of much higher quality than a teacher-designed project.