In a bustling Cairo café, a group of secondary school students huddled around a laptop, excitedly demonstrating their new study companion: ChatGPT. Across Egypt, from Cairo to the coastal cities and the Nile Delta, such scenes are becoming common. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot, launched globally in late 2022, has quietly found its way into Egyptian classrooms and is stirring both enthusiasm and anxiety in equal measure. A New Tool Reaches Egypt’s Classrooms Although ChatGPT was not initially available in Egypt, tech-savvy students quickly found workarounds to access it. Its appeal is obvious: the generative AI can produce essays, summarize lengthy texts, or answer complex questions in seconds. In a country with over 25 million students enrolled in schools, the potential impact on learning is profound. “AI is a fact of life. You can love it or hate it, but it is here—and it is here to stay,” says Rola Hussein, an IGCSE English literature teacher in Cairo. “The only safe way around it is proper training.” Hussein describes using short, guided activities—idea generation, practice questions, and scaffolded explanations—followed by in-class tasks that require each pupil’s own thinking. Students are…
