Fifteen high school students form South Taranaki head for San Francisco and Silicon Valley in July to see where their studies in technology could take them.

They’re part of Ngati Ruanui’s 2NuiCODE programme, which aims to give a basic grounding in coding, robotics and other technology disciplines.

Runanga chief executive Debbie Ngarewa-Packer says after attending a Maori innovation boot camp at Stanford University, she wanted to bring some of that innovation back home.

2NuiCODE started as a holiday programme, but it’s now become a weekly exercise for rangatahi and their whanau who have become excited by what they can build and where they could go with what they are learning.

These are our rangatahi that the education system is telling us can't learn, that they're not doing well, that they're not statistically achieving and I challenge that. The problem is we're not relevant, we're not providing and teaching them material or resources in an environment where they can grow and be as beautiful as that they really truly are," Ms Ngarewa-Packer says.

After they’ve visited companies like Google and Apple, the rangatahi should come back with valuable experiences and lessons they can share with their peers.