Year 12 pupils Nguyen Van Hoai Linh and Ngo Quang Hieu from Da Nang’s Le Quy Don Senior High School for Gifted Students have won the municipal-level Scientific and Technological Creation Competition for the 2016 - 2017 academic year with a device to help blind people to read and write easily.

Hoai Linh showing a blind girl how to use a Braille keyboard

Their idea for their Braille Dot device came unexpectedly when they visited the city’s Nguyen Dinh Chieu Special School for Disabled Children.  They saw the difficulties blind pupils faced when trying to read Braille on paper or the wooden boards created by the school’s teachers.

The two boys realised that the learning support tools in local schools and centres for visually impaired students are too simple and outdated.  The blind use manually carved letters on plastic paper and board, and it takes them many hours to write a page of paper, which then tears easily.  The alternative, modern tools imported from foreign countries, is very expensive.  This problem has caused many difficulties for local blind pupils, and has not helped them to integrate easily.

As a result, Linh and Hieu made great efforts to create a device to help the blind to write and read more easily.

With his skills in IT, Hieu was put in charge of creating the software for the device. The talented student has a rich experience in programming algorithms and he designed the software’s interface.

Apart from excelling in programming skills, both Hieu and Linh are also interested in learning more about electronics, integrated circuits, and mechanical transmission.  Such aspects are usually only studied at university-level.  

Linh and Hieu’s invention is one of the 6 local scientific works which have been chosen to compete at a national-level Scientific and Technological Creation Competition in Vung Tau City next month.  So far, the boys have perfected their product with a focus on enhancing its aesthetics, sound quality, and processing speed.