arXiv subjects

Victor Kumbol

Publications and source records attributed to Victor Kumbol.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

"Why SuaCode?": Understanding African Students' Motivations for Taking a Smartphone-Based Online Coding Course

Computer programming MOOCs are instrumental in providing students with high-quality instruction in areas where there is limited access. They are especially beneficial to post-secondary African students as less than 1% of them leave secondary school with fundamental coding skills. One strategy for increasing their efficacy for African students is to understand students' motivation for enrolling. These insights can inform the design of MOOC content and assessments to align with students' interests. We administered an open-ended response survey to (self-identified) Africans enrolled in a smartphone-based online coding course (SuaCode). We analyzed a random sample of 450 (of 3000) responses using a grounded theory approach. We found that most African students (68.7%) participated in SuaCode for intrinsic reasons such as improving themselves, learning with like-minded individuals, and gaining skills to help address societal issues. We discuss the implications of these findings in the design of programming MOOCs targeted at African students.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Kwame 2.0: Human-in-the-Loop Generative AI Teaching Assistant for Large Scale Online Coding Education in Africa

Providing timely and accurate learning support in large-scale online coding courses is challenging, particularly in resource-constrained contexts. We present Kwame 2.0, a bilingual (English-French) generative AI teaching assistant built using retrieval-augmented generation and deployed in a human-in-the-loop forum within SuaCode, an introductory mobile-based coding course for learners across Africa. Kwame 2.0 retrieves relevant course materials and generates context-aware responses while encouraging human oversight and community participation. We deployed the system in a 15-month longitudinal study spanning 15 cohorts with 3,717 enrollments across 35 African countries. Evaluation using community feedback and expert ratings shows that Kwame 2.0 provided high-quality and timely support, achieving high accuracy on curriculum-related questions, while human facilitators and peers effectively mitigated errors, particularly for administrative queries. Our findings demonstrate that human-in-the-loop generative AI systems can combine the scalability and speed of AI with the reliability of human support, offering an effective approach to learning assistance for underrepresented populations in resource-constrained settings at scale.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

AfricAIED 2024: 2nd Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in Education in Africa

Recent AI advancements offer transformative potential for global education, yet their application often overlooks Africa's unique educational landscape. AfricAIED 2024 will address this gap, spotlighting efforts to develop AI in Education (AIED) systems tailored to Africa's needs. Building on the success of the inaugural workshop, AfricAIED 2024 will feature an online AI Hackathon focused on democratizing preparation for Ghana's National Science & Maths Quiz (NSMQ). Participants will create open-source AI tools leveraging resources from the Brilla AI project to level the academic playing field and enhance science and math education across Africa. The workshop will showcase top competitors' solutions, invite discussions on AIED opportunities and challenges in Africa, and highlight the latest advancements in AI education integration. AfricAIED 2024 aims to foster collaboration and innovation, amplifying African voices in the AIED community and driving positive change in African education through AI.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Real-World Deployment and Evaluation of Kwame for Science, An AI Teaching Assistant for Science Education in West Africa

Africa has a high student-to-teacher ratio which limits students' access to teachers for learning support such as educational question answering. In this work, we extended Kwame, a bilingual AI teaching assistant for coding education, adapted it for science education, and deployed it as a web app. Kwame for Science provides passages from well-curated knowledge sources and related past national exam questions as answers to questions from students based on the Integrated Science subject of the West African Senior Secondary Certificate Examination (WASSCE). Furthermore, students can view past national exam questions along with their answers and filter by year, question type, and topics that were automatically categorized by a topic detection model which we developed (91% unweighted average recall). We deployed Kwame for Science in the real world over 8 months and had 750 users across 32 countries (15 in Africa) and 1.5K questions asked. Our evaluation showed an 87.2% top 3 accuracy (n=109 questions) implying that Kwame for Science has a high chance of giving at least one useful answer among the 3 displayed. We categorized the reasons the model incorrectly answered questions to provide insights for future improvements. We also share challenges and lessons with the development, deployment, and human-computer interaction component of such a tool to enable other researchers to deploy similar tools. With a first-of-its-kind tool within the African context, Kwame for Science has the potential to enable the delivery of scalable, cost-effective, and quality remote education to millions of people across Africa.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Can an AI Win Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz? An AI Grand Challenge for Education

There is a lack of enough qualified teachers across Africa which hampers efforts to provide adequate learning support such as educational question answering (EQA) to students. An AI system that can enable students to ask questions via text or voice and get instant answers will make high-quality education accessible. Despite advances in the field of AI, there exists no robust benchmark or challenge to enable building such an (EQA) AI within the African context. Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz competition (NSMQ) is the perfect competition to evaluate the potential of such an AI due to its wide coverage of scientific fields, variety of question types, highly competitive nature, and live, real-world format. The NSMQ is a Jeopardy-style annual live quiz competition in which 3 teams of 2 students compete by answering questions across biology, chemistry, physics, and math in 5 rounds over 5 progressive stages until a winning team is crowned for that year. In this position paper, we propose the NSMQ AI Grand Challenge, an AI Grand Challenge for Education using Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz competition (NSMQ) as a case study. Our proposed grand challenge is to "Build an AI to compete live in Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz (NSMQ) competition and win - performing better than the best contestants in all rounds and stages of the competition." We describe the competition, and key technical challenges to address along with ideas from recent advances in machine learning that could be leveraged to solve this challenge. This position paper is a first step towards conquering such a challenge and importantly, making advances in AI for education in the African context towards democratizing high-quality education across Africa.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Kwame for Science: An AI Teaching Assistant Based on Sentence-BERT for Science Education in West Africa

Africa has a high student-to-teacher ratio which limits students' access to teachers. Consequently, students struggle to get answers to their questions. In this work, we extended Kwame, our previous AI teaching assistant, adapted it for science education, and deployed it as a web app. Kwame for Science answers questions of students based on the Integrated Science subject of the West African Senior Secondary Certificate Examination (WASSCE). Kwame for Science is a Sentence-BERT-based question-answering web app that displays 3 paragraphs as answers along with a confidence score in response to science questions. Additionally, it displays the top 5 related past exam questions and their answers in addition to the 3 paragraphs. Our preliminary evaluation of the Kwame for Science with a 2.5-week real-world deployment showed a top 3 accuracy of 87.5% (n=56) with 190 users across 11 countries. Kwame for Science will enable the delivery of scalable, cost-effective, and quality remote education to millions of people across Africa.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

SuaCode Africa: Teaching Coding Online to Africans using Smartphones

There is a burgeoning trend of smartphone ownership in Africa due to the low costs of Android smartphones and the global increase in social media usage. Building upon previous works that introduced a smartphone-based coding course to secondary and tertiary students in Ghana via an in-person program and an online course, this work introduced Africans in 37 countries to our online smartphone-based course in 2019. Students in this 8-week course read lesson notes, submitted assignments, collaborated with peers, and facilitators in an online forum and completed open and closed-ended surveys after the course. We performed qualitative and quantitative analyses on the data from the course. Out of the 709 students that applied, 210 were officially admitted to the course after passing the preliminary assignments. And at the end of the course, 72% of the 210 students completed the course. Additionally, students' assignment submissions and self-reports showed an understanding of the programming concepts, with comparable performance between males and females and across educational levels. Also, students mentioned that the lesson notes were easy to understand and they enjoyed the experience of writing code on their smartphones. Moreover, students adequately received help from peers and facilitators in the course forum. Lastly, results of a survey sent to students a year after completing this program showed that they had developed various applications, wrote online tutorials, and learned several tools and technologies. We were successful at introducing coding skills to Africans using smartphones through SuaCode Africa.

cs.HC↗