San Diu female student loves programming, wins national Robocon championship

Although she is a rare female student in an all-male university class, Hien has participated in many competitions. Most recently, she and her teammates won the Robocon 2023 championship, representing Vietnam at the Asia-Pacific Robocon.

Diep Thi Hien, a final year student majoring in Electronics and Telecommunications at Hanoi University of Industry, has just become one of 20 outstanding students to receive the 2023 Vietnam Female Science and Technology Student Award. This award is for female students with outstanding academic and research achievements in a number of specific fields of science and technology.

The San Diu ethnic girl said she was surprised to receive this award. However, this is also an encouragement, helping her understand that "each person will have a strength in a specific field".

Diep Thi Hien is a final year student majoring in Electronics and Telecommunications, Hanoi University of Industry.

Diep Thi Hien was born into a family with a father of the San Diu ethnic group and a mother of Chinese ethnicity. Her whole family later moved to Luc Ngan (Bac Giang) to make a living growing lychees.

The family has many children, in addition to her younger brother who is in 7th grade, Hien also has 3 older sisters. The difficult family circumstances have instilled in the sisters in the family an independent and strong personality, not having to depend on anyone.

“We were programmed to do housework and help our parents with the fields outside of school hours. From the oldest to the youngest, no one went to extra classes. It was always the adults teaching the younger ones, from childhood until now.”

In high school, Hien passed the entrance exam to Luc Ngan Boarding School for Ethnic Minorities, and was exempted from tuition and living expenses. With her energetic and active personality, the female student was elected as class secretary, then deputy secretary of the school's Youth Union. For Hien, participating in youth union activities is like a passion that "seeps into the blood".

Hien is one of 20 students receiving the 2023 Vietnam Female Science and Technology Student Award.

At the time of the high school graduation exam, among many choices, Hien decided to study Engineering like her sister. When they were in elementary school, both sisters often watched the Robocon program. Later, because of her passion, her sister also chose to study Electronics and Telecommunications. Every time she came home, hearing her sister talk about the industry, Hien's interest grew even more, even though many people said that this field of study was dry and not suitable for girls.

Admitted to the Electronics and Telecommunications Department of Hanoi University of Industry, as expected, Hien’s class had 65 people but 60 were male. However, the female student did not feel “disadvantaged” because she had been introduced to the major very carefully by her sister beforehand.

“In the first two years, I learned how to assemble electronic circuits, software, and even programming. I kept going from one excitement to another because I didn’t think I would learn so deeply and broadly,” Hien recalls.

In her third year, when she had a certain amount of professional “capital”, Hien registered for the faculty’s Robocon team. Since August last year, when Hanoi University of Industry organized a school round to select a team to compete in the Northern round, the female student has been actively researching and designing robots with the team.

Hien’s team successively passed the school round, the Northern qualifying round and reached the national final round. “It was a very long journey, taking a lot of time and effort. The further we went, the stronger the opponents became, so the whole team had to constantly change the structure to make the robot the most optimal.”

This year’s topic is “Exploring an Ancient Temple”. Each team has 2 robots working together to throw rings of the same color into the designated column as quickly and accurately as possible. With such rules, the robots need to be trained in the ability to pick up and throw rings. The female student’s task is to create an electronic circuit – the internal machine that helps the robot operate.

“These are the two mechanisms that took the team the most time to think about. Because of continuous improvement, each round we came up with a completely different robot.”

Female student and teammates win national championship at Robocon 2023

The preparation and training process for the robot took so long that the team had to “eat and sleep at school”.

“On days when we don’t have classes, the whole group will go to the lab to make circuits from 7am, or even earlier. After lunch, the whole group continues working until late at night, when the school locks the door.”

When the robot was almost completed, the group continued to move to the workshop to test and practice, even working through the night in the workshop, only daring to take a nap to keep up with the progress. Although always in a busy state, according to Hien, the process of making the robot also made the female student feel "touched by her passion".

During this process, Hien still tried to balance participating in union activities and studying. After 3 years, Hien's overall score reached Excellent with 4/6 scholarships.

Although he felt he had to trade off time and his score was "still not as expected", in return, Hien was able to deepen his knowledge of electronic circuits and learned patience and high discipline.

“For example, when making circuit boards, I learned not to be hasty, because there are small components in mm, if not meticulously and carefully soldered, the circuit board will not be complete.”

Thanks to those efforts, at the final match of Robocon Vietnam 2023, Hien's team won the championship for Hanoi University of Industry after 15 years of waiting.

When representing Vietnam at the Asia-Pacific Robocon, the team continued to win third place with the Chinese team. In addition, the Vietnamese team was also highly appreciated for its mechanical design and was awarded the Excellent Engineering Award.

In August 2023, after the Robocon competition ended, Hien tried her hand at the IoT Challenge competition. Hien's team researched the topic "Designing a patient health monitoring system", in which the female student was mainly responsible for the circuit part. This topic later won the overall first prize.

The more she participates in competitions, the more passionate she becomes about the engineering field and wants to continue to deepen and expand her knowledge.

Next year, Vietnam will host the Asia-Pacific Robocon competition. The competition theme announced by Vietnam is “Harvest Day”, inspired by rice cultivation on terraced fields. Diep Thi Hien said she will continue to research and build robots and is determined to retain the championship title in the 2024 competition.

Also at the beginning of this school year, Hien applied for and won a scholarship from Foxconn Group. Thanks to that, the female student had the opportunity to intern in her final year and was committed to a job after graduation. The female student said that this was a favorable opportunity to help her have an environment to promote the knowledge she had learned and develop professionally.

Vietnamnet.vn