Original title: Can Out-of-School Street-Connected Youth Learn to Code? A Mixed-Methods Feasibility Study of Web Development Training
Toheeb Omobolaji Lasisi · September 2026
Out-of-school street-connected youthYoung people who live or work on the streets and lack stable housing or family support. are usually left out of computing education. Researchers tested if these young people could learn to build websites despite having no prior computing background. The team ran a hands-on web development training where learners practiced writing code and building real digital projects. The participants created working web pages, sign-up forms, and basic website code using modest resources. They gained interest in computing, built their coding knowledge, and felt more confident in web development. In their project work, they successfully broke down tasks, planned steps, and fixed errors together. Standard tests showed only small gains in computational thinkingA way of solving problems by breaking them into steps, recognizing patterns, and writing instructions a computer can follow., which means the ability to solve problems like a computer programmer. Real-world pressures to survive and earn money also made it hard for learners to stay in the program. Overall, teaching practical web skills to street-connected youth is workable, but they need outside support to stay enrolled.
Imagine teaching a friend to cook a simple meal in one afternoon. You have a small kitchen, few ingredients, and no time to cover everything. Your friend picks up the basics and manages to make a decent dish, but then has to rush off to a shift and never learns the rest. In this paper, the cooking lesson is a four-week training, the friend is a young person living on the streets, the dish is the website they built, and the shift they rush off to is the economic pressure that pulls them away.
Most digital inclusion efforts ignore out-of-school and street-connected youth, leaving them further behind as the world goes digital. This study shows that with modest resources and a project-based approach, these young people can learn real web development skills and gain confidence. But it also warns that training alone isn't enough — survival needs and economic pressures can cut participation short.
The study does not establish whether the gains persist over time, whether they generalize beyond this small group in Lagos, or whether computational thinking actually improved given the mixed survey and project evidence. It also does not compare this approach to other training methods, and the small sample and high dropout limit any strong conclusions.
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Can Out-of-School Street-Connected Youth Learn to Code? A Mixed-Methods Feasibility Study of Web Development Training — Toheeb Omobolaji Lasisi — EdArXiv — doi:10.35542/osf.io/6v4ke_v1
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.