HCMC students bring Braille board to international competition

The invention of the Electronic Braille Display Board by two students of Le Hong Phong High School for the Gifted (HCMC) is considered an Ebook for the visually impaired. This is also one of two inventions representing Vietnamese students participating in the international arena of science and technology.

Female student worries about reading for the blind

During a visit to a shelter for blind children, Tran Thi Dieu Lien, an 11th grader specializing in English at Le Hong Phong High School for the Gifted (HCMC), couldn't help but worry when she heard a volunteer say that blind children love to read books. However, making books that translate normal content into Braille for them requires manual marking on paper, which is very time-consuming. At that moment, Dieu Lien immediately thought of a special type of e-reader for blind children - a disadvantaged group that cannot access information through sight.

Dieu Lien introduced her research topic Electronic Braille Display Board for the visually impaired at the final round of the Science and Technology Competition for high school students in Ho Chi Minh City in the 2013-2014 school year.

When Lien cherished the dream of making this special machine, she learned about the 2014 Science and Technology Competition for high school students, which gave her more motivation to carry out the topic of electronic Braille display boards for the visually impaired.

The basis of this invention is the application of knowledge about the attraction of magnets, the principle of LED lights. This application is to directly display the raised edges on the surface of the board through interaction with the computer. The device operates on the basis of txt files on the computer, when the machine is connected, it will encode the text with software and display the Braille markings on the surface of the reader. The operating mechanism is simple, the characters have 6 raised edges for the blind to touch and read.

After many tests, the device was gradually completed, becoming one of 12 topics of Ho Chi Minh City to compete at the national level.

Student inventions go international

Entering the national exam, Dieu Lien had the support of Nguyen Nam Du (a bilingual 12th grader at the same school) to improve and upgrade the machine. After school hours, in the evenings or on Sundays, the two friends discussed, worked and assigned tasks according to each person's strengths. Lien focused on programming, while Du did the mechanical part, creating equipment drawings through software... to make the machine more compact and convenient.

Seeing the two of them working so hard to upgrade the machine, forgetting to eat and sleep, many nights staying up until 1-2 am, the family was very worried, afraid that it would affect their health and studies. But at that time, seeing the passionate and tired look of Dieu Lien and Nam Du, no one dared to speak up to stop them. As the two of them shared, although the structure and operating mechanism of the board is very simple, only when they directly started doing it, did they fully understand how time-consuming and laborious this work was. The two of them seemed to have a strong motivation to perfect the electronic Braille display board so that the visually impaired have more opportunities to read books.

After the machine was completed, Du and Lien took it to knock on the door of a blind facility in the city. The greatest joy for the two “young inventors” was not the awards but when their “child” was told by the deaf children that it could be used and they were very excited about this magical machine. In particular, the cost of the machine, according to the two children, if put into production, would be less than 800 thousand VND.

At the National Science and Technology Innovation Competition for high school students in the 2014 school year in the Southern region, the Electronic Braille Display Board for the visually impaired by Dieu Lien and Nam Du excelled over 133 projects of 283 contestants from middle and high schools in 27 provinces and cities and won the overall first prize.

This topic of the two students, along with the topic of Computer Programming Robot of student Nguyen Huynh Ngoc Khanh (Nguyen Hue High School, Phu Yen) will be participating in the Intel ISEF competition taking place in the United States next May.

According to Dan Tri