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

Abstract

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.

Kwame: A Bilingual AI Teaching Assistant for Online SuaCode Courses

“…An AI could potentially augment the efforts of the limited number of teachers, leading to better learning outcomes. Towards that end, we built Brilla AI as the first key output for the NSMQ AI Grand Challenge, which proposed a robust, real-world challenge in education for such an AI: "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" [24]. The NSMQ is an annual live science and mathematics competition for senior secondary school students in Ghana 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 [25].…”

“…Building upon a successful inaugural edition of this workshop last year -AfricAIED 2023 [2] -this year's workshop -AfricAIED 2024 4 -aims to crowdsource and highlight efforts to build and deploy AIED systems in Africa as well as discuss potential opportunities and challenges. This workshop will be centered around an online AI Hackathon that builds upon our open-source project, Brilla AI [4,5] which is building an AI Contestant to address our proposed grand challenge in education -NSMQ AI Grand Challenge -"Build an AI to compete in Ghana's National Science & Maths Quiz Ghana (NSMQ) competition and win -performing better than the best contestants in all rounds and stages of the competition" [3]. The NSMQ is an annual live science and mathematics competition for senior secondary school students in Ghana 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 [10].…”

“…given they are both live quiz shows, that entail question answering. It differs, given its science education focus making it arguably more challenging, and provides unique sets of technical challenges discussed previously and also by Boateng et al [2]. Despite the similarity with the IMO Grand Challenge as both focus on STEM education, it differs by having a scope of both science and math education, and consists of a live competition (IMO is only written).…”

“…Motivated by this need, in our position paper -"Can an AI Win Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz? An AI Grand Challenge for Education" Boateng et al (2023) that was presented at the Practical Machine Learning (ML) for Developing Countries workshop at ICLR 2023, we proposed a grand challenge in education -NSMQ AI Grand Challenge -"Build an AI to compete in Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz Ghana (NSMQ) competition and win -performing better than the best contestants in all rounds and stages of the competition". We laid out the motivation for the work, key technical challenges, and future plans.…”

“…Motivated by this need, Boateng et al proposed a grand challenge in education -NSMQ AI Grand Challenge -which is a robust, real-world challenge in education for such an AI: "Build an AI to compete in Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz Ghana (NSMQ) competition and win -performing better than the best contestants in all rounds and stages of the competition" [2]. In that work, they detailed the motivation for the challenge along with key technical challenges that have to be addressed for an AI to win the NSMQ.…”