Before a learner can work out the answer, she has to understand the question.
We use AI to read that question aloud, in her own language, in a voice she recognises.
What the AI does
The AI is the voice. It reads the sentence on the screen aloud in isiXhosa, including the numbers, which the curriculum requires to be spoken in isiXhosa.
It does not write the maths. The curriculum comes from Matific. The schools, the hardware and the teachers come from Click Learning. The AI adds the one thing that was missing: a voice that speaks the language properly.
How it works for a learner
- 1. She reads a sentence in her own language.
- 2. When she is not sure, she presses the speaker icon.
- 3. She hears it come back to her correctly.
Since launch, learners have been choosing to press that icon more often. Nobody is telling them to.
Why the voice has to be right
A language option is not the same as inclusion. A voice that cannot say a click is not speaking isiXhosa.
Learners hear the difference long before adults do. Close enough is still wrong to a child learning to read.
So the clicks were rebuilt from the ground up. Where engineering alone could not produce a word, we recorded a linguist saying it properly and used her recordings. First-language speakers listened for the things that were quietly wrong.
Where it is running
Today, twenty schools in the rural Eastern Cape are doing maths in isiXhosa. The audio was tested in classrooms in launch week and confirmed correct by isiXhosa speakers who teach in the language every day.
What comes next
There is a great deal more isiXhosa maths still to roll out across the Eastern Cape.
Masifunde.