# Leveraging AI to Advance Science and Computing Education across Africa: Challenges, Progress and Opportunities

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.07397 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07397/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Conditional Variational Autoencoder with Adversarial Learning for End-to-End Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06103/) (2021)
- [Real-World Deployment and Evaluation of Kwame for Science, An AI Teaching Assistant for Science Education in West Africa](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10786/) (2023)
- [Kwame: A Bilingual AI Teaching Assistant for Online SuaCode Courses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11387/) (2020)
- [SuaCode Africa: Teaching Coding Online to Africans using Smartphones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12257/) (2021)
- [Kwame for Science: An AI Teaching Assistant Based on Sentence-BERT for Science Education in West Africa](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13703/) (2022)
- [Can an AI Win Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz? An AI Grand Challenge for Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13089/) (2023)
- [Towards an AI to Win Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04333/) (2023)
- [AutoGrad: Automated Grading Software for Mobile Game Assignments in SuaCode Courses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12244/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.