The African continent lacks enough qualified teachers which hampers the provision of adequate learning support. An AI could potentially augment the efforts of the limited number of teachers, leading to better learning outcomes. Towards that end, this work describes and evaluates the first key output for the NSMQ AI Grand Challenge, which proposes a robust, real-world benchmark 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". 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. In this work, we built Brilla AI, an AI contestant that we deployed to unofficially compete remotely and live in the Riddles round of the 2023 NSMQ Grand Finale, the first of its kind in the 30-year history of the competition. Brilla AI is currently available as a web app that livestreams the Riddles round of the contest, and runs 4 machine learning systems: (1) speech to text (2) question extraction (3) question answering and (4) text to speech that work together in real-time to quickly and accurately provide an answer, and then say it with a Ghanaian accent. In its debut, our AI answered one of the 4 riddles ahead of the 3 human contesting teams, unofficially placing second (tied). Improvements and extensions of this AI could potentially be deployed to offer science tutoring to students and eventually enable millions across Africa to have one-on-one learning interactions, democratizing science education.

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.