About 50 of the most accomplished high school students from the greater San Francisco Bay Area attended the morning session of the event, witnessing demos of some of Microsoft Research’s most promising projects, lunching with researchers from the group’s Silicon Valley and Redmond labs, and basking in the type of environment that, for many, will constitute their academic and professional futures.

“I think a lot of them are interested in computer science,” said Paul Lin, a Stanford University master’s candidate who helped deliver a demo during the event. “I can tell just by the questions they’re asking. They’re asking questions like ‘What language is this made from?’ ‘How do you compress the video?’ and some hardware questions. They’re definitely interested.”

That’s good news for a U.S. educational system in which interest in computer science has been waning over the last few years. But if the collection of youths in attendance for the Valley Road Show is any indication, help is on the way. A few of them found time to reflect on how their day went.