SPRINGFIELD — Tech Foundry, the computer education program that aims to turn Western Massachusetts into the technology capital of the Northeast, will graduate 23 high school students on June 17 and then turn its attention to a new class of recent high school graduates.

The shift from starting with a class of high school juniors about to start their senior years to a class made up of recent high school graduates who are not in college or on a strong career path is just one of a series of experiments Tech Foundry originator Delcie Bean wants to undertake.

"That includes kids who maybe took a year off after high school, or got accepted at a college and couldn't afford it," Bean said.

He next plans to run a class of community college students, another made up of veterans and one made up of incumbent workers in the local computer industry who need to modernize their skills. All students will get intensive computer training meant to prep them for hard-to-fill IT and computer science jobs at local employers.

Unlike the first class which had a year-long program, the upcoming classes will be time-compressed, lasting just about four months.

"We are still in our infancy and we are still figuring out our model," Bean, founder and CEO of Paragus IT, said in an interview. "We knew when we first launched Tech Foundry that there are a lot of different populations that we can serve."

Tech Foundry started a year ago with a class of 25 students. Of those, 24 completed a summer program and 23 completed a subsequent program during their senior years at area high schools. Of the graduates, all of them are pursuing careers in science and technology fields and 90 percent are in information technology.

Students got to meet Apple Co-founder Steve Wozniak, got a visit from then-Gov. Deval Patrick and earned "badges" related to specific computer skills.

Tech Foundry has 96 badges and will add 15 to 20 more. Each relates to a specific skill called for by employers.

"It's not enough to say you know Excel," Bean said. "Employers will say, 'I need them to be able to make pivot tables in Microsoft Excel 2013.'"

Most students in the graduating class earned just more than 30 badges. One student earned 67.

"That was mostly a function of how much time the student had available during the school year," he said.

That's an advantage of recruiting students who are out of high school and presumably can make a four-month course a top priority, especially when it is likely to lead to a good-paying job.

Tech Foundry might one day have a class of high schoolers again, Bean said. Again, he stressed that these are experiments.

"We work very closely with our employer partners," he said.

The money for Tech Foundry comes from donors, not government. The pilot program just concluding needed $480,000. The program has staff, space in downtown Springfield and provided students with laptops.

In the second phase, Bean expecting to need to need $500,000 and has already raised $150,000.