Artificial Intelligence in Physics Education: Opportunities and Challenges in Yobe State Tertiary Institutions in Nigeria

In physics education, Artificial Technologies (AI) like intelligent tutoring systems, virtual laboratories, adaptive learning platforms, machine learning applications, and AI-powered simulations are reshaping instructional delivery and students’ learning experiences. This paper explores the opportunities and challenges associated with the integration of AI in physics education. AI has emerged as a transformative technology in education, significantly influencing teaching, learning, assessment, and research processes across disciplines. Three research questions served as the basis for the study’s descriptive survey research design. Structure questionnaires were used to collect data from physics instructors and students, and descriptive statistics were used for analysis. The results showed that AI improves conceptual understanding, helps virtual experimentation, enhances tailored learning, boosts student engagement, and enables efficient assessment procedures in physics education. Effective AI integration is hampered by issues like inadequate infrastructure, bad internet access, inadequate teacher competency, high implementation costs, ethical concerns, and a lack of institutional support. The study comes to the conclusion that although AI has a great deal of promise to change physics education, sustained deployment would require strategic investments in infrastructure, training, policy creation, and curriculum modification.