Puppet theater fans have a lot of imagination! Three students from Changzhong High School won the international competition using AI puppeteering "Silver"

Students from Zhang Middle School love to watch puppet shows. They combine traditional opera with AI and robots to participate in international competitions. They defeat powerful enemies and return home triumphantly with a silver medal.

[Reporter Zhang Congqiu/Changhua Report] If you like watching puppet shows, you can also become creative inspiration! Three Changhua High School students, Hsu Chih-cheng, Chen Xinbo, and Huang Jianyuan, combined AI, robotics and traditional puppetry. They represented Taiwan and went to India to participate in this year's (2026) WRO International Robot Olympia Asia-Pacific Open Championship. They won out of 149 teams from 25 countries and won the silver medal in the "Future Innovators" project, allowing Taiwanese puppetry to shine on the international stage.

This year's WRO International Olympia Robotics Asia Pacific Open Championship held in India has just concluded. Zhang Zhong represented Taiwan in the competition and won the silver medal, bringing glory to Taiwan.

With the theme of "Robots Meet Culture", this competition encourages students to use technology to respond to cultural issues. The Zhangzhong team competed under the theme of "AI and Traditional Puppetry Mini Theater". Instructor Qiu Kewen said that the team's initial starting point came from the Changhua County Education Cup Robot Competition. The students started from life experience and personal interests. Among them, Huang Jianyuan is a Puppetry fan, thinking about whether technology can be used to make more people pay attention to the true connotation of traditional culture. This idea gradually developed into a complete topic spanning robotics, AI and traditional performing arts.

Three people used cameras to capture the movements of real puppeteers, and then handed them over to AI for recognition and analysis, and then converted them into control instructions for the mechanical puppets to follow the performance. They also added script analysis, voice generation and micro theater design.

Huang Jianyuan said that to do this project, you not only need to learn mechanics, programming and AI, but also have to re-understand the puppet show. Especially when you compete in India, you also have to find a way to let the judges from different countries understand the story of Taiwan's puppet show.

Xu Zhicheng and Chen Xinbo also shared that they constantly tested, failed and then corrected everything from mechanical structure to puppet manipulation accuracy to signal transmission. The biggest gain was not to complete the work, but to learn how to dismantle problems and find ways to solve them, and how to cooperate with AI.

Cheng Yansen, the principal of Chang Middle School, affirmed that the students have used Taiwanese culture as the foundation to let foreigners know Taiwan's puppet show. He encouraged the team to continue to improve and fight again next year to return home with a gold medal.