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At first glance this looks like any average summer camp.

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But these teens are an academic elite, the top one percent based on the SAT.

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As smart as they are, they want to be smarter.

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So they come here to the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, or CTY,

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with alumni like Sergey Brin, who went on to co-found Google.

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The kids call it Nerd Camp.

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For three weeks, six hours a day, they write or do math or design mousetraps or dissect brains.

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I think we have a hippocampus, which is really exciting.

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It's challenging and it's fun. And I like the kids.

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Sometimes in school, like, if you actually do show off, not a lot of people like that, when the other people stand out.

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Here all the kids are outstanding.

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But you have to wonder, will they still be exceptional 10 years from now or 20 years? Even 30?

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According to Camilla Benbow, the answer is yes.  

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Benbow has studied super-high achievers for more than three decades.

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What we have found in our work is that more is better.

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More intelligence, that is.

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Benbow followed the brightest kids who were identified by the Hopkins program.

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The higher their SAT score at age 12, the more likely a child was to get a Ph.D. from a prestigious university,

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to earn more money, and to take out patents on new inventions.

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In fact, the smartest 12-year-olds got advanced degrees nearly as often as students that were already enrolled in graduate school.

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One of the most impressive kids was Terry Tao, an Australian who made a nearly perfect score on the math SAT when he was just 8 years old.

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By 16 he was at Princeton. By 24 he was a full math professor at UCLA.

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And this summer he received a Fields Medal, considered the Nobel Prize in mathematics.

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At age 30 he is a remarkable success story.  

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But he says it was a tough transition.

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When you're in school, you get problems served to you in these little bite-size pieces.

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You know, like you have these homework assignments, and every problem you know there's a solution.

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And you even know where to find the solution, and so forth.

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And, as opposed to real life, where it's sort of much more unfair, right?

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You can get the problems and there might not be a solution, or, you know, if there is, nothing you've learned will let you handle it.

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Benbow says CTY and other programs like it ensure that kids like Terry Tao aren't lost in the shuffle.

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But a lot of kids have that drive, and it may come out on their own,

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but their environment, in order to really develop those talents, that environment has to be there to nourish it.

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Not all brilliant adults were overachieving kids.

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Peter Agre won the 2003 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

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He got a D in the subject in high school.

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You won't find many D students here, but you just might find the next Einstein or Hemmingway or Charlie Parker.