AI Dragon Head

A dragon’s personality appears in a turn of its head, a tilt or an opening jaw. The AI Dragon Head team imagined bringing those gestures into an interactive encounter: a dragon that responds to a person standing in front of it. Their project connected Chinese cultural inspiration with paper craft, robotics and AI face tracking.

Your movement becomes its movement

A camera and face-tracking application detect the user’s movements. That information is sent to a small controller, which tells the motors inside a LEGO structure how to move the folded-paper head. The outside gives the dragon its character; the system within allows it to respond.

For the children, the challenge was to make the artistic idea and the technology work together. They had to think about the experience a visitor would see, then connect sensing, coding and movement to create it.

When the dragon would not move

As the design grew, the original motors struggled to carry the head. The students had to look beyond the code: the weight and the way the head was supported were affecting its movement. Stronger motors and redesigned supports helped them move forward. Testing made the relationship between a creative choice and a physical limit visible.

Some ambitions changed too. The team focused on a moving lower jaw and used coloured lights in place of difficult-to-align mechanical eyes. They practised deciding which features mattered most to the experience and where a simpler approach could help the project work.

Learning to have another way forward

A test brought an unexpected setback when the face-tracking website became unavailable. The children added rotary and touch controls so the dragon could still move. They were learning to think beyond a successful demonstration: what should happen when something outside their control stops working?

Those experiences gave their pitch a story with substance. They could explain what they wanted to create, show how it worked and describe the choices that helped them get there. The dragon became a meeting point between culture and technology — and a chance for its young creators to practise adapting, solving problems and making their thinking understood.