Bradley Carwardine

Lecturer in Computer Science & PhD student

Worcester Business School

Department of Computing

Research Degree Students

Contact Details

email: b.carwardine@worc.ac.uk

Bradley has extensive industry experience in many technology sectors. He has worked in commercial programming, networking infrastructure installation and has supported the UK Special Forces in a variety of technological integration projects. Bradley is a qualified teacher and has been teaching computer science for over 15 years. He has been teaching in the FE and HE for the last 5 years.

Bradley has a MSc in Advanced Computer Science from Birmingham City University, where he was awarded a Distinction grade. The title of his dissertation was “A Conversational Agent enabled IDE for Novice Programmers”. Within his MSc research the concept of using a Conversational Agent, (or ‘A.I. chatbot’), to assist novice programmers to edit code was piloted. The functional prototype utilised a Voice User Interface, (V.U.I.), that enabled the user to issue spoken instructions to the system. The users were able to phrase instructions in natural language instead of predetermined commands.

This area of research is being further developed at PhD level with Worcester University. Bradley’s PhD research is focused on whether a VUI enabled Conversational Agent can assist novice programmers to debug code. The work aims to determine if A.I. assisted ‘coaching’ is perceived as a benefit to users when learning to debug code.