These Students Could Take Us to the Moon
A small group of high school teenagers lounging on a beat-up sofa chat about where to get free 7-Eleven Big Gulps, while the rock band Nirvana blares from the mini-speakers of a computer.
Screen savers featuring teen heartthrobs Natalie Portman and Mandy Moore pop up on two computers where kids concentrate on what look like complicated video games.
Signs of teenager-hood abound, but these are not ordinary high school students. They are cradling college-level computer programming and math textbooks in their laps. And instead of playing Tomb Raider or shooting down alien warships, they’re making models of robots that could one day build a colony for humans on the moon.
This is the Jisan Research Institute, a few sparse rooms in a nondescript, two-story building in Pasadena. Here, 53 high school students, whose average grade point average is 3.85, prepare for careers in science and medicine.
During school-year weekends and summers, students ages 13 to 19 work on research projects commissioned by university scientists. The director of the institute chooses from projects proposed by outside scientists and graduate students. Companies or universities, including Caltech and USC, pay for the research costs and sometimes the tuition fees.
“If a scientist brings us a problem, we’ll solve it,” said 29-year-old Sanza Kazadi, the director. “Now, that’s pretty cool.” (The name Jisan is a combination of his wife’s first name, Jisoo, and his own.)
Since the program started seven years ago, students have published nine papers in science journals, and they’ve helped develop a new technology for facial image recognition.
Some students have presented their findings at science conferences around the world. Last week four of the students presented a paper that was accepted at a computer science conference called “Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 2002” in Bologna, Italy. Among the topics discussed were artificial intelligence and distributive computing, or the processing power of a massive number of computers simultaneously.
The institute “is different from school,” said 16-year-old Michael Chung of Arcadia High School, who attended the conference in Italy. “In school, you don’t get to do stuff like this. You don’t learn enough to know how to do stuff like this.”
Kazadi, who has his undergraduate degree and doctorate from Caltech, started the nonprofit institute out of his college apartment with only a card table, a computer and a few students he was tutoring.
“The idea was that kids wanted to learn more than what they were learning in school,” Kazadi said.
While working toward his PhD, Kazadi, a bright-eyed, stocky man, took a few motivated high school students under his wing. He guided them on research related to his own thesis on swarm engineering-- creating swarms of relatively simple and inexpensive robots. The robots, whose forms are yet to be determined, might be used in large numbers to, for example, erect buildings, patrol oceans during war, or build a deep-sea generator.
Never mind that some of Kazadi’s colleagues are still going through puberty. He is confident about working with teenagers because of their limitless imaginations.
“Most of these guys are even smarter than me,” Kazadi said with a wide smile. “These kids are much more motivated and intelligent than they are given credit for.”
Kazadi said he starts them so young because kids get turned off in high school.
“Their main experience in science is taking a biology class, a physics class and a chemistry class,” Kazadi said. “This place gives students a way of validating their training.”
The program is a bargain on both ends. The high school students, who receive no school credit, get the rare opportunity to publish early, receive lab work training and contribute to groundbreaking research. Outside scientists get relatively inexpensive labor, and grad students get teaching experience and finish a lot of their thesis work that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do alone.
For Kazadi, it helped get a third of his doctoral thesis on swarm engineering researched and written. He now runs the institute full-time.
High school participants such as 17-year-old Angelina Ang of Arcadia High School have found mentors and the opportunity to experiment with computer programming.
“There’s a lot of people I can look up to here,” said Ang, wearing a hot pink T-shirt and glasses. “And I like technological things like robots. It sounded so cool.” She is among 13 girls in the institute, a number Kazadi wants to increase.
To apply to the institute, students write an essay and interview with the director. Acceptance is based on grades and interest in science research. Students must be in eighth grade or high school and have completed or be in the process of completing a first course in algebra. Those in high school must have a minimum 3.5 GPA.
Tuition is $325 a month. For students who cannot afford it, Kazadi tries to find outside funding. Already, Caltech sponsors five students, and USC funds 10. Six sponsored slots remain open.
Once accepted, students can also join the institute’s SAT preparatory course, peer tutoring, summer advanced math and electronics classes.
To be eligible to begin research, students work on math problems independently and present answers in one-on-one sessions with instructors.
Students also must learn two computer programming languages, Pascal and C, by reading the textbooks and practicing on the computers. They consult an on-site instructor if they have questions. Then they can pick a research group based on their interests.
This year the two projects are swarm engineering and evolutionary design, a computer design system that would base mechanical designs on the evolution of natural biological life forms.
Kazadi said his main goal is to train young people early to help alleviate the scientist drought in the United States.
“If the flow of scientists stops from abroad, America will collapse,” Kazadi said.
“In terms of its ability to stay cutting edge in science and engineering, we simply don’t have the people.”
Already, he has plans for his students’ next research project: using Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field to beam energy to the planets in the solar system.
“You could power any spacecraft back and forth with just the power of Jupiter,” Kazadi said dreamily. “That would be pretty neat. Already, some of our kids are starting to think about it.”
