Leveraging AI to Advance Science and Computing Education across Africa:
  Progress, Challenges, and Opportunities
George Boateng
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 book chapter,
we describe our works developing and deploying AI in Education tools in Africa:
(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. We discuss challenges and potential opportunities to use AI to
advance science and computing education across Africa.