Neels van der Westhuizen and Mark Horner

Siyavula has developed Intelligent Practice, a low-cost adaptive learning tool tailored specifically for high school mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Over and above having access to the basic textbook resources needed to achieve their education, students also need to actively engage with the content by practicing to truly master the skills and concepts. 

Intelligent Practice is a learning platform that enables optimized, adaptive practice for mastery. It provides questions to students that are programmatically generated; automatically marked, providing detailed, pedagogically sound model solutions; and sequenced in a way that is tailored to an individual's skill level by a machine learning algorithm, which encodes the recent and relevant cognitive science research. The service can be used on any internet-enabled device, including feature phones (the precursors to smartphones), making it widely accessible. Based on students’ practice history, the service provides dashboards: for individuals giving them agency to reflect on and direct their own learning; for teachers to monitor their classes in real-time and inform their teaching practice; and for administrators at all levels to identify areas of need and make informed decisions.

Intelligent Practice complements the catalogue of free and open textbook titles developed by Siyavula. These cover Grade 4 - 12 mathematics and the sciences, of which more than 10 million copies have been printed by the Department of Basic Education and distributed to 25,000 schools across South Africa. They are also used online around the world.

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