Researcher profile

Samuel John

Samuel John contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

3 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

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

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. 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. 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. 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.

preprint2026arXiv

NSMQ Riddles: A Benchmark of Scientific and Mathematical Riddles for Quizzing Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown good performance on various science educational benchmarks, demonstrating their potential for use in science and mathematics education. Yet, LLMs tend to be evaluated on science and mathematical educational datasets from the Western world, with an underrepresentation of datasets from the Global South. Furthermore, they tend to have multiple-choice answer options that are trivial to evaluate. In this work, we present NSMQ Riddles, a novel benchmark of Scientific and Mathematical Riddles from Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz (NSMQ) competition to evaluate LLMs. The NSMQ is an annual live TV competition for senior secondary school students in Ghana that brings together the smartest high school students in Ghana who compete in teams of 2 by answering questions in biology, chemistry, physics, and math over five rounds and five stages until a winning team is crowned for that year. NSMQ Riddles consists of 11 years of riddle questions (n=1.8K) from the 5th round, with each riddle containing a minimum of 3 clues. Students compete to be the first to guess the answer on any of the clues, with earlier clues being vague and also fetching more points. The answers are usually a number, word, or short phrase, allowing for automatic evaluation. We evaluated state-of-the-art models: closed (GPT-5.4, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Claude Opus 4.6) and open models (Kimi-K2.5, DeepSeek-V3.1, GPT-OSS-120B) with high and low reasoning settings. Our evaluation shows that the dataset is challenging even for state-of-the-art LLMs, which performed worse than the best student contestants. This work contributes a novel and challenging benchmark for scientific and mathematical reasoning from the Global South towards enabling a true global benchmarking of LLMs' capabilities for science and mathematics education.

preprint2022arXiv

Kwame for Science: An AI Teaching Assistant Based on Sentence-BERT for Science Education in West Africa

Africa has a high student-to-teacher ratio which limits students' access to teachers. Consequently, students struggle to get answers to their questions. In this work, we extended Kwame, our previous AI teaching assistant, adapted it for science education, and deployed it as a web app. Kwame for Science answers questions of students based on the Integrated Science subject of the West African Senior Secondary Certificate Examination (WASSCE). Kwame for Science is a Sentence-BERT-based question-answering web app that displays 3 paragraphs as answers along with a confidence score in response to science questions. Additionally, it displays the top 5 related past exam questions and their answers in addition to the 3 paragraphs. Our preliminary evaluation of the Kwame for Science with a 2.5-week real-world deployment showed a top 3 accuracy of 87.5% (n=56) with 190 users across 11 countries. Kwame for Science will enable the delivery of scalable, cost-effective, and quality remote education to millions of people across Africa.