Contest Brings Some of Nation’s Brightest Students to Clemson University

CLEMSON, SC – Some of the nation’s brightest high school students will be at Clemson University this week to take part in a training camp that decides which four will go to Taiwan to represent the United States in an international computer-programming contest.

While on campus, the 24 students will live in the dorms, participate in lectures on advanced computing techniques and sharpen their problem solving skills by working through daily programming contests.

The training camp goes from May 22-31 and is part of the United States of America Computing Olympiad.

All the programming problems are cow-themed to add a sense of humor to the camp curriculum, but the students’ smarts are no joke.

“They’re immensely talented kids,” said Dr. Brian Dean, the Olympiad director and an associate professor of computer science at Clemson. “They routinely solve problems that would be challenging even for university-level graduate students.”

The training camp participants secured their spots by standing out in a series of six Internet competitions throughout the past academic year. They scored highest in a field of about 2,500.

The top four from training camp will go to Taipei, Taiwan in July to represent the United States in the 26th annual International Olympiad in Informatics. It’s the world’s most prestigious programming contest at the high school level, Dean said.

The event was founded in 1989 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and is hosted by a different country each year.

Most of the students at Clemson’s camp are juniors and seniors in high school, but a few are as young as 8th grade. Some have been to camp multiple times.

They come from throughout the country, and one is a U.S. citizen living abroad in China.

The most advanced students work through programming problems for as long as five hours a day, while first-time campers spend more time in classroom lectures.

When students practice competition problems, it’s not enough for their computer programs to work. The programs also have to run quickly.

“If you solve it the wrong way, it will take hours of computing time,” Dean said. “If you solve it the right way, it takes a millisecond. It’s all about knowing the right algorithm.”

Students who attend camp take part in a number of fun computing challenges beyond the standard camp curriculum.

Last summer, students computed the shortest route required to tour the 500 brightest stars in the sky, then visualized the result on the giant dome of Clemson’s on-campus planetarium.

They also write programs to compete against each other in a strategy game with each player representing a farmer whose goal is to obtain as much milk as possible.

The cow theme goes back to the Olympiad’s origins at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, where it started in 1993.

Dean attended training camp and was a member of the USA programming team as a student in 1994. He became a coach three years later.

The training camp later moved to Colorado College and then to Clemson in 2010. This year’s training camp participants are:

Grad	Name	School	State
2015	James Bloxham	Phillips Academy	MA
2014	Joshua Brakensiek	Homeschool	AZ
2017	Bryan Chen	Monta Vista High School	CA
2014	Bill Cooperman	Agawam High School	MA
2015	Alexander Dai	Mission San Jose High School	CA
2015	Matthew Das Sarma	Montgomery Blair High School	MD
2016	Demi Guo	Hangzhou Foreign Language School	China
2014	Steven Hao	Lynbrook High School	CA
2015	Andrew He	Monta Vista High School	CA
2016	Samuel Hsiang	Thomas Jefferson High School	VA
2018	William Hu	Miller Middle School	CA
2017	James Li	Mission San Jose High School	CA
2015	Kevin Liu	Dougherty Valley High School	CA
2015	Yang Liu	Ladue High School	MO
2017	Tiger Luo	St. Andrew’s School	DE
2014	Jerry Ma	West Lafayette High School	IN
2015	Vivek Miglani	Stoneman Douglas High School	FL
2018	Dhruv Rohatgi	Davidson Academy of Nevada	NV
2018	Nicholas Sun	Kennedy Junior High School	IL
2015	Scott Wu	Baton Rouge Magnet High School	LA
2016	Yang Yan	The Waterford School	UT
2015	David Zeng	Upper Dublin High School	PA
2015	Hugh Zhang	Valley Christian High School	CA
2017	David Zhu	The Harker School	CA