Adesua: Development and Feasibility Study of an AI WhatsApp Bot for Science Learning in West Africa

Adesua：西非科学学习 AI WhatsApp 机器人的开发与可行性研究

Abstract: Sub-Saharan Africa faces persistently high student-teacher ratios and shortages of qualified teachers, limiting students’ access to personalized learning support and formative assessment. To address this challenge, we present Adesua, a WhatsApp-based AI Teaching Assistant for science education that extends the Kwame for Science platform.

摘要： 撒哈拉以南非洲地区长期面临师生比例过高和合格教师短缺的问题，这限制了学生获得个性化学习支持和形成性评估的机会。为了应对这一挑战，我们推出了 Adesua，这是一个基于 WhatsApp 的科学教育 AI 助教，它扩展了“Kwame for Science”平台的功能。

Adesua leverages WhatsApp’s widespread adoption in Africa to provide accessible, curriculum-aligned learning support for Junior High School (JHS) and Senior High School (SHS) students across West Africa. The system integrates curated textbooks and 33 years of national examination questions with generative AI to enable conversational question answering and automated assessment with feedback via a WhatsApp bot.

Adesua 利用 WhatsApp 在非洲的广泛普及，为西非各地的初中（JHS）和高中（SHS）学生提供易于获取且符合课程标准的学习支持。该系统将精选教材和 33 年的国家考试真题与生成式 AI 相结合，通过 WhatsApp 机器人实现对话式问答和带有反馈的自动化评估。

Students can ask science questions, take timed or untimed multiple-choice tests by topic or exam year, and receive instant grading and detailed explanations of correct and incorrect responses. A 6-month feasibility deployment in 2025 had 56 active users in Ghana, including students and parents.

学生可以提出科学问题，按主题或考试年份进行限时或不限时的多项选择测试，并获得即时评分以及对正确和错误答案的详细解释。2025 年进行的为期 6 个月的可行性部署在加纳拥有 56 名活跃用户，其中包括学生和家长。

Quantitative evaluation showed a high perceived usefulness, with a helpfulness score of 93.75% for AI-generated answers, albeit with a small number of ratings (n=16). These preliminary results provide a basis for more extensive future evaluation of a WhatsApp-based AI assistant to assess its potential to offer scalable, low-cost personalized learning support and formative assessment in resource-constrained educational contexts.

定量评估显示，用户对其感知有用性评价很高，AI 生成答案的帮助得分达到 93.75%（尽管评分样本数量较少，n=16）。这些初步结果为未来对基于 WhatsApp 的 AI 助教进行更广泛的评估奠定了基础，旨在评估其在资源受限的教育环境中提供可扩展、低成本的个性化学习支持和形成性评估的潜力。