Kagukar Study Buddie

One challenge of traditional learning styles in Africa is the retention and recall capacity of students. This issue is even more complicated for blind and sight-challenged students in Africa because the effort to convert the entire education curriculum for all subjects into textbooks and teaching aids in braille is practically non-existent. The statistics of learning show we retain 10% of what we read and 20% of what we hear, which is double. Kagukar seeks to solve the challenge of inclusive learning and better curriculum retention for blind students, in particular. It is an education solution that uses the power of artificial intelligence. It works like an interactive, voice-activated robot that helps a student study, do practice tests, and even play and relax from studies, by audio delivery of content. If scaled it has the potential of facilitating inclusive, and remote learning, and better retention particularly for blind students in Africa.

A 2016 UNESCO report revealed that students in the poorest countries are suffering from a lack of basic textbooks. Director of UNESCO's Monitoring Report, Mr. Benavot, stated that "Next to a good teacher, well-designed textbooks in sufficient quantities are the most effective way to improve students' learning."

According to the report, most governments were spending less than 1% of education budgets on textbooks. The report reveals that providing one textbook per pupil in sub-Saharan African countries would increase literacy scores by between 5% and 20%.

An additional challenge is the capacity of students to assimilate and retain what is taught. Current teaching styles are not producing the best outcomes.

The 26.3 million blind people of Africa who require special braille books and learning aids are more disadvantaged in this regard. Sustained effort to convert entire education curriculum for all subjects into textbooks and teaching aids in braille for the visually impaired are practically non-existent. This has led to learning exclusion for the blind and a weakening of effective teaching, learning, and retention for this already disadvantaged segment of the population. Kagukar seeks to address the challenge of ease of access to educational content as well as students’ retention and recall.

This project is named “Kagukar, Study Buddie”. Kagukar is formed from three words, Ka in Yoruba, Guo in Ibo, and Karanta in Hausa which all mean to read in each of these major Nigerian languages.

Kagukar is a learning assistant that uses the power of artificial intelligence to read to and interact with a student by voice-activated instruction. It works like an interactive, voice-activated robot that helps a student study and solves practice tests by audio delivery of content. It can also help the student relax from studies by listening to African stories, playing games, solving riddles, and listening to jokes.

It works essentially by delivering entire curriculums, course material, and textbooks for various subjects, presented as text files, as easier to digest audio content. So Kagukar is like a personal digital audio library of school curriculum and content that is readily available to the student on a hand-held device, PC, or laptop. We intend to iterate to add some video content in the future.

The application was built using JavaScript, CSS, Bootstrap, jQuery, and a text-to-voice API.

While Kagukar is currently being piloted as a web app, it also has a mobile version which we intend to optimize.

Kagukar works essentially by delivering entire curriculums, course material, and textbooks for various subjects, presented as text files, as easier-to-digest audio content. Because it is like a personal digital audio library of the school curriculum and learning content that is readily available to the student on a hand-held device, PC, or laptop, it, therefore, becomes a very useful learning aid and companion to blind students. With the help of Kagukar, they can now study full classes and curriculums on their own by simply giving the app voice instructions. Kagukar becomes the teacher for almost every subject in the school curriculum, who is always available by their side ready to teach on a phone, tablet, or laptop. I believe Kagukar will light up their world.

Another reason I created Kagukar is to give financially disadvantaged students who might not have access to textbooks, the ability to still study and progress in their education by access to well-curated audio content that maps to the school curriculum.

Very importantly, Kagukar is created to facilitate learning assimilation, retention, and recall by leveraging the power of audio delivery and spaced repetition. The statistics of learning show we retain 10% of what we read and 20% of what we hear, which is twice as much. So we can double the capacity of students to understand what they are being taught with Kagukar’s audio approach to content delivery. While it may not be convenient for the student to ask the teacher to repeat himself in class, with Kagukar a student can replay sections of interest over and over until he or she understands it.  

One of my motivations for creating this app is my desire to make learning and study more fun for students by having a digital assistant read to them. I believe integrating fun into the learning experience also facilitates knowledge retention.

The MIT Solve community is in search of technology-based solutions that ensure all primary and secondary school learners have access to quality, safe, and equitable learning environments.

We have identified a challenge in the access of African students in general to textbooks and quality learning content. This challenge is amplified for blind and sight-challenged students who require special resources to access learning.

We have also identified a constraint in the assimilation and retention capacity of students because of the gaps in the teaching styles currently employed.

Kagukar seeks to provide a relatively simple solution to the problem of access to content for both regular and blind students. It also seeks to close the gaps in knowledge retention by adopting an approach that has been scientifically proven to double assimilation and recall.

So it is evident that this solution is well in alignment with the Challenge and with the dimension that we have specifically selected.

Kagukar is currently in its second-level prototyping. I developed and concluded the first prototype in October 2020. This was submitted for a hackathon which got the project some attention. I am currently working on the building of a better-optimized version-2 of the prototype with a small team.  

My solution is innovative because it applies AI in a simplified format to address a long-standing problem of inclusive education and learning retention. Giving African students easier access to educational content will be transformational in its impact. As the 2016 UNESCO Monitoring Report stated, "providing one textbook per pupil in sub-Saharan African countries would increase literacy scores by between 5% and 20%".
 

We are still prototyping. We intend to deploy to the population of Nigerian students in secondary schools first and then expand to other countries of Africa. In 5 years we hope to have covered most countries in West Africa

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We have people with technical competence in programming on our team and others with business management skills

We believe the Kagukar solution can substantially impact learning and its desired outcomes of assimilation and retention for the African student in general and the blind ones in particular. We are applying to Solve because we desire access to the support we need to make our dreams for Kagukar a reality