Henry's Sunday at ICIA Vietnam 2025

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25th February 2025

Hi everyone, I’m Henry 🗣️🔊!!!

Guess what? 2 Sundays ago (16th February 2025), I participated in a STEM competition with my other 2 friends. The event was called “ICIA Vietnam 2025”. Our teacher told us about the event in the end of November 2024. At first, I didn’t think of joining this event because I was lazy. However, he told us that we will get a 10 for our formative assessment, so…

I joined with two other classmates. We started to plan for our project then and went to the event for the last two weeks. I’ll tell you a bit about what we went through. It was fun (and felt like hell ☠️). However, I’m not so good at writing long stories, so I’ll present it as a timeline. Hope you enjoy 👍.

And now, this is the full timeline of our journey prepared for ICIA Vietnam 2025:

13th December 2024:

  • 10:35 AM: Henry created a Google doc file 📄for planning on this project.

  • 11:00 AM: The trio started listing possible or interesting ideas 💡.

  • 2:20 PM: We decided on the final idea (team name, features, products, and materials).


One of our sketches for the car, this one is about the robotic arm.
The arm failed to work by the way.

  • 20th December 2024: We started on designing the poster to introduce our product.

After New Year celebration:

  • 3:10 PM - 10th January 2025: The first set of components arrived, we started to build it up 👷. The overall chassis was done.


This is the chassis that we bought.

  • 12:00 PM - 15th January 2025: We spent our lunch recess planning up the circuit 🔌 and placing main components onto the bottom plane of the chassis.

17th January 2025:

  • 2:40 PM: We made another doc file for video script 🎞️. The organization wanted us to also upload a video which briefly showed our car.

  • 12:00 PM & 3:10 PM: We spent our lunch recess and self-study period putting the finals on the top plane of the chassis.

On the way:

  • 7:40 PM - 19th January 2025: We finally completed the video script. Then, we started to record and edit the video 📽️ in the afternoon, because the deadline for submission is 20th January.

  • 20th January 2025: Most of our task was done, we had a rest before starting to modify the car ⚙️.


We quipped all of the needed features.
It looked kinda "ugly" because of the wires.



  • 10th - 15th February 2025: After the Lunar New Year holiday, we spent all of our focus on our car. We tried to complete it but it was very hard.

  • 8:00 PM - 15th February 2025: A few wires were broken, a component was on fire, we had no tools to fix it, we almost fainted.


The moment before disaster🗲

16th February 2025, I supposed to have an enough sleep:

  • 0:00 AM - 3:00 AM: I was supposed to sleep to have energy for the competition day, but I need to fix our car. L298, the module for controlling the wheels, was burnt, but luckily, I found an old one from a car I made with a physics teacher last year, so I tried to replace it. Magically, the car could move again 😭. 

  • 1:00 AM: I focused on coding the ultrasonic sensors, but it just worked a bit, so I plugged the batteries 🔋 to the wheels again to see it run. Unexpected, I saw smoke from one of the batteries ☠️. I removed the battery right away and never tried running the car again. Tired, I was shut down 🪫.

  • 3:00 AM: I gave up (for both the wheels and sensors) and went to bed 🛌. I had to wake up at 6:00 AM because of my schedule, so I need to sleep at least a few hours 💤.

  • 6:00 AM: I wake up and prepare to go because I don’t want to be late for the competition. I almost vomited 🤮 a few times, I think it’s because of my unusual sleeping time, and I was worried.

The rest of the day was good, I enjoyed the event. Our team and the others also got 2 scholarships. We were happy even when we didn't need those scholarships (it can only be applied to specific programs).

We rested for a week until now.

  • 25th February: The day I’m writing this post. I told my teammates to start to modify the car again on Friday. Our schools will have a Science Fair in 2 months and we will apply for our car again 🪦.

Me and my team will change to the deadly schedule again. I’ll write an update a few weeks later when I feel like I want to write. Our current plan is to research to make a new robotic arm combine with gears.

And finally, this is the end! Hope you enjoyed reading this long post 😀. See you in the next diary page 👀!
Location: District 7, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

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