The seemingly simple question that Princeton computer scientist Bernard Chazelle
posed to students turned out to be a doozy.

“How many security guards does it take to police this mall?” he asked, drawing,
on a classroom chalk board, a building with a number of different wings. “You need to hire guards,
and the guards need to see all parts of the mall at any given time, but one guard can’t see
everything.”

title=”Sponsored by the National Science Foundation through the Center for Computational
Intractability, this program aims to boost high school student interest and ability in computer science.
Photo by Frank Wojciechowski.” width=”500″ />

For the next hour, the students, most of whom were in high school, proposed ways to answer Chazelle’s
question, using concepts from mathematics and computer science typically taught only to college students.

The students, who included four university undergraduates and 16 high school students, were
attending the Summer Program in Theoretical Computer Science at Princeton. The program, intended to boost
high school student interest and ability in computer science, was sponsored by the National Science
Foundation through the Center”>http://intractability.princeton.edu/”>Center for
Computational Intractability, a multi-institution center that explores the most difficult
theoretical problems in computer science.

The students came from New Jersey, California and India to attend the program, which ran from June
22 to August 12.

“It’s a great opportunity for these students,” said Moses”>http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~moses/”>Moses
Charikar, professor of computer science at Princeton and member of the intractability center who
helped organize the program. “We give them a friendly, inspiring environment to work with other
students who share their interests and to learn from top-notch computer scientists.”

src=”/wp-content/uploads/cs-summer-school-01.jpg” title=”Rajiv Gandhi, a faculty member
at Rutgers University-Camden, gave the students daily lectures. Photo by Frank Wojciechowski.” width=”500″
/>

During the program the students attended daily lectures taught by Rajiv Gandhi and Tejas Gandhi,
faculty members at Rutgers University-Camden, and guest lectures by computer scientists affiliated with the
Center for Computational Intractability. In addition to Princeton and Rutgers faculty, researchers from the
Institute for Advanced Study and New York University are affiliated with the center.

The summer program at Princeton grew out of informal lectures on computer science that Gandhi began
giving on weekends in 2009 at Rutgers University-Camden to Cherry Hill East High school and Haddonfield High
school students, and a similar program hosted at Rutgers-Camden last summer. “I’ve learned
that high school students can grasp college-level topics in computer science, and that they are very
interested in learning,” Gandhi said.

During the program, the students studied a range of topics related to Theoretical Computer Science,
including Discrete Mathematics and Algorithm Design, covering the equivalent of two introductory
undergraduate courses in computer science.

In his lecture Chazelle, the director of the Center for Computational Intractability, taught
computational geometry, an area of computer science that deals with algorithms that use geometric concepts
to solve problems. His question about how to calculate the number of guards needed to police a mall served
as an introduction to the basic concepts of this field.

“It’s been an amazing opportunity, “ Henry Liu, a recent graduate of
Princeton High School who attended the course, said after Chazelle’s lecture. “It really
teaches you how to think in a different way, to solve problems critically.”

Anusha Chheda, a high-school sophomore from Mumbai, India, who decided to attend the program after
attending lectures by Gandhi in India, said the program changed her perceptions about computer science.
“I first thought computer science only related to computers, but really it’s about logic
and thinking,” she said.

Based on the success of this summer’s program, the Center for Computational Intractability
is considering offering the program next summer. “This gives the students a sneak peek into what
they might study in college and shows them that there is a lot of theory behind the computer applications
they use every day,” Charikar said. “This year was an experiment, and it was a great
success.”