“The things they’re learning are of a sufficiently abstract nature that it works over this medium,” he said.

Although only Boston public school students can currently participate in the program, organizers said they hope to include more areas and schools depending on demand.

“We’re definitely thinking of expanding beyond Boston, but that’s way in the future,” Berman said. “We need to make sure there are plenty of people watching over [current students].”

Dougherty said he has also tried to recruit individual Boston high schools rather than relying on the library system to advertise to students, but has met with success only at a public charter school.

“We’ve called many schools many times but haven’t been able to make much headway because people are too busy,” he said. “We have not had negative response.”

Dougherty has been working on software code for the tutoring project since last December and began talking to librarians and recruiting tutors at the beginning of the school year.

He wrote about one-third of the code and took the rest from publically available open-source software. Dougherty used money from his summer job to pay for the project’s server, housed in Maxwell Dworkin.

Although expenses have been minimal, tutors will ask technology-oriented non-profit groups and technology companies to donate money to offset hardware and operating costs, Dougherty said.