Leveraging AI to Advance Science and Computing Education across Africa: Challenges, Progress and Opportunities
George Boateng
TL;DR
This chapter documents Africa-specific educational barriers and the underutilization of AI tools tailored to African contexts. It presents six AI-in-Education solutions (SuaCode, AutoGrad, Code Plagiarism Detectector, Kwame, Kwame for Science, Brilla AI) designed for smartphone and web deployment, detailing their architectures, multilingual capabilities, and early deployment outcomes. The work demonstrates how automated assessment, retrieval-based tutoring, and context-aware QA can augment scarce teaching resources, improve feedback, and scale access to science and computing education across multiple African countries. It argues for mobile-first design, localized data and content, and community-driven initiatives to advance equitable AI-enabled education across Africa.
Abstract
Across the African continent, students grapple with various educational challenges, including limited access to essential resources such as computers, internet connectivity, reliable electricity, and a shortage of qualified teachers. Despite these challenges, recent advances in AI such as BERT, and GPT-4 have demonstrated their potential for advancing education. Yet, these AI tools tend to be deployed and evaluated predominantly within the context of Western educational settings, with limited attention directed towards the unique needs and challenges faced by students in Africa. In this chapter, we discuss challenges with using AI to advance education across Africa. Then, we describe our work developing and deploying AI in Education tools in Africa for science and computing education: (1) SuaCode, an AI-powered app that enables Africans to learn to code using their smartphones, (2) AutoGrad, an automated grading, and feedback tool for graphical and interactive coding assignments, (3) a tool for code plagiarism detection that shows visual evidence of plagiarism, (4) Kwame, a bilingual AI teaching assistant for coding courses, (5) Kwame for Science, a web-based AI teaching assistant that provides instant answers to students' science questions and (6) Brilla AI, an AI contestant for the National Science and Maths Quiz competition. Finally, we discuss potential opportunities to leverage AI to advance education across Africa.