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.

翻译：非洲师生比例较高，限制了学生获取教师学习支持（如教育问答）的机会。本研究扩展了面向编程教育的双语AI教学助手Kwame，将其适配至科学教育领域，并以Web应用形式部署。Kwame for Science整合了精心筛选的知识库文本及历年国家考试真题，为学生提供基于西非高中证书考试（WASSCE）综合科学科目的答案。此外，学生可查看带答案的历史考题，并按年份、题型及主题进行筛选——这些主题由我们开发的自动主题检测模型（未加权平均召回率91%）自动分类。我们开展了为期8个月的真实世界部署，覆盖32个国家（含15个非洲国家）的750名用户，累计处理1,500个提问。评估结果显示Top-3准确率达87.2%（n=109题），表明Kwame for Science在三个展示答案中至少提供一个有效答案的概率较高。我们分类分析了模型答错原因，为后续改进提供启示，并总结了此类工具在开发、部署及人机交互环节的挑战与经验，以助力其他研究人员部署相似工具。作为非洲语境下首个此类工具，Kwame for Science具备为全非洲数百万人提供可扩展、低成本、高质量的远程教育潜力。