“I’ve gone to hackathons in the city and it’s noticeable when you’re the only person of color,” Dylan said. “That feeling of being alone makes people less likely to want to join the field.”

The scene on Thursday — a crowd of young, mostly black and Hispanic men learning to code — is unusual for New York, where tech classes in city schools are still mostly dominated by white and Asian students.

Just 10% of offers at the city’s elite technical high schools went to black and Hispanic kids in 2016, despite the fact that they make up nearly 70% of the city’s overall student body.

“I’ve gone to hackathons in the city and it’s noticeable when you’re the only person of color,” Dylan said. “That feeling of being alone makes people less likely to want to join the field.”

The scene on Thursday — a crowd of young, mostly black and Hispanic men learning to code — is unusual for New York, where tech classes in city schools are still mostly dominated by white and Asian students.

Just 10% of offers at the city’s elite technical high schools went to black and Hispanic kids in 2016, despite the fact that they make up nearly 70% of the city’s overall student body.

But a fast-growing Manhattan nonprofit called All Star Code, which operates the classes Dylan and his fellow students are attending this summer, aims to change that equation.

All Star Code was founded in 2013 by Christina Lewis Halpern, a black Filipina Harvard grad. She started All Star to introduce underserved kids to the high-demand fields of science, technology, engineering and math — better known as STEM.

“There are more than 3 million black and Latino teenage boys in this country and I see them as a vast, largely untapped talent pool,” said Halpern, 36, of Manhattan. “There are so few programs targeted at our boys, particularly in the engineering space.”

All Star Code landed a $250,000 donation from telecom giant AT&T in 2016, money it will use to pay for this summer’s classes and a planned expansion. The corporate heavyweight has invested in several city programs to improve diversity in STEM, including Girls Who Code, which enrolled 240 juniors and seniors from city high schools this year in free summer computing classes.

AT&T New York President Marissa Shorenstein said that the company is investing in homegrown tech talent to ensure that it has access to qualified workers for the highly skilled jobs it is creating, right in its own back yard.

“We want to see young people succeed and become the leaders of tomorrow,” Shorenstein said. “Programs like All Star Code are really important.”

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