Kiemute Oyibo, a professor at the Lassonde School of Engineering, wants to make learning easier and more memorable for students.
Since joining York in 2022, Oyibo noticed that students sometimes struggled to retain content between classes. This was especially true in memory-intensive disciplines like biology, psychology and human-computer interaction, which require knowing and application of key principles and concepts.
Oyibo wanted to find a way to help.
“I was trying to look for ways I can support students to learn and retain the content beyond the course,” he says.
He thought of mnemonics – memory aids that leverage how the brain encodes, stores and retrieves information. “Mnemonics can efficiently encapsulate knowledge in a way that makes it easier to recall and frees up cognitive resources for higher-order processes, such as understanding, analysis and synthesis,” he explains.
Oyibo drew on his expertise in machine learning, persuasive technology, human-centred design and creative writing. Persuasive technology involves designing digital tools that encourage users to take positive actions – such as fitness apps that motivate regular exercise or contact tracing applications that increase public health participation – without manipulation or deception. Human-centred design emphasizes building solutions around the needs, experiences and behaviours of real people, rather than forcing them to adapt to rigid systems.
Oyibo applied these principles to previous research, creating personalized digital health tools that adapt to different cultures and communities. This technology, he says, helps users stay healthy while addressing barriers that exclude underrepresented groups.
Now, he is focused on the development of the SANKOFA Project, a toolkit named after the Akan word “Sankofa” meaning “go back and fetch what is lost” and an acronym for "Save All New Knowledge Optimally and Fetch Accurately."
The toolkit leverages memory-enhancement principles and has two main application components: SAVE (Selection, Association, Visualization, Elaboration); and RADAR (Recollection, Association, Decoding, Artifacts Review). The SAVE tool allows students to create mnemonics using text, images, audio and video to encode complex information, while the RADAR app supports retrieval practice, helping learners recall, reflect on and reinforce learnings through interactive exercises and games.
Oyibo’s current work uses AI and genetic algorithms to optimize mnemonics for learning, aiming for what he calls “mnemonic singularity” – mnemonics that cannot be significantly improved in terms of effectiveness to maximize knowledge retention. He incorporates the SAVE tool and RADAR app in this work to promote engagement, active recall and consistent practice through interactive exercises and gamified learning.
The toolkit also accommodates different learning styles with multimodal mnemonics – text, images, audio and video – with plans to support translations to enhance accessibility across languages and cultures.
Early testing at York is encouraging and shows the SANKOFA Toolkit can improve learning and memory retention, says Oyibo. Pilot studies in Ghana are exploring how the approach generalizes in other educational contexts. His findings will be published over the next few months.
While the toolkit is currently designed to serve university students, Oyibo envisions scaling it to learners of all ages and deploying it far beyond York. “I want to organize the world’s knowledge using mnemonics – not just mnemonics, but effective mnemonics. I’m thinking of a platform where teachers and students can collaborate with gamification used to reward meaningful and useful contributions. The goal is deployment in classrooms, not just here in Canada, but globally.”
At its core, Oyibo’s work builds on the inspiration for the SANKOFA Project: helping people overcome barriers and achieve success.
This philosophy connects much of his past research. Before arriving at York, he worked at the University of Waterloo on contact tracing applications during the COVID19 pandemic, using persuasive design and personalized behavioural insights to improve public health engagement.
At York, he is focusing on inclusive design in fitness and health technologies, applying AI and machine learning to tailor digital tools for underrepresented populations – work that earned him a Gold Award at the 2019 Human-Computer Interaction International student design competition and a Discovery Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
Across all these projects, Oyibo’s guiding principle remains the same: “I want to solve real-world problems that have a great impact and make meaningful contributions. I want to be a key player, not a spectator, in the global stage of research and development.”