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.

翻译：非洲各地普遍缺乏足够的合格教师，这阻碍了为学生提供教育问答（EQA）等充分学习支持的努力。若能构建一个允许学生通过文本或语音提问并即时获得答案的AI系统，将推动高质量教育的普及。尽管人工智能领域已取得进展，但在非洲语境下，尚缺乏用于构建此类EQA人工智能的稳健基准或挑战。加纳国家科学数学竞赛（NSMQ）因其涵盖广泛科学领域、题型多样、高度竞争性以及实时实况的赛制，成为评估此类AI潜力的理想平台。NSMQ是一项类似Jeopardy的年度现场问答竞赛：由3支队伍（每队2名学生）在生物学、化学、物理学和数学领域展开角逐，历经5轮、5个渐进阶段，最终决出年度冠军。在本立场论文中，我们提出NSMQ人工智能大挑战——以加纳国家科学数学竞赛为案例的教育领域AI大挑战。该挑战的核心目标是：“构建一个能实时参与加纳国家科学数学竞赛（NSMQ）并获胜的AI系统——在竞赛所有轮次和阶段中表现优于最佳参赛者。”我们描述了竞赛规则、需应对的关键技术挑战，以及可借鉴的机器学习最新进展。本立场论文是攻克此类挑战的第一步，其重要意义在于推动非洲语境下的教育人工智能进步，进而促进整个非洲大陆高质量教育的平民化。