In recent days, Vivek Wadhwa, an American technology entrepreneur and pundit, has been helping to run a “hackathon” in the San Francisco area.

But this did not comprise the usual computer coding and brainstorming sessions that occur at places such as Facebook or Google. There were no hoodie-wearing men in their twenties chewing on Chinese takeaways as they tossed around brilliantly lucrative entrepreneurial ideas.

Instead, Wadhwa's “hackathon” involved dozens of poor Latino and black teenagers from the impoverished part of Oakland, a place far removed from the wealth-soaked Palo Alto region. And instead of trying to create the next gazillion-dollar IPO, Wadhwa and other computing experts were trying to teach poor kids to “code”, with a hope of inspiring them to become software engineers.