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Signup, Signin and Language Chooser
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Introducing Indy — the Dragon Master guide
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Choosing a Fun Avatar
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Earning your first Experience Points (XP)
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Building up a Profile with XP's and any Found Puzzle Pieces
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A Fun, Animated Dragon Following the Training Path
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Listing the Training Path Modules
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Watching the first Video Lesson
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Choosing a Paid Membership Plan
Inspiration
Our experience has shown us that children are struggling with the world around them. As adults, we need to empower them to defend themselves against life's challenges by developing strong physical, mental, and emotional skills. This applies to children all over the world whatever the culture and their age.
Who are we to say this? We are Glenn & Steve — both friends and parents to 5 children across 2 families — and we have created the iDragons Academy together.
Steve has already developed a unique, and very successful, children’s development training programme for 4–18 year olds called the Kung Fu Dragons founded in 2005 with roots back to 1992. Its basis is in traditional Chinese martial arts which has been fused with modern day children’s fitness training techniques. But, more than that, deep within the teaching is a full structure to address each child’s mental and emotional development alongside their physical improvements.
For many years Glenn has wanted to present this programme on the internet to reach a wider audience and allow those families to access the benefits no matter where they happen to live in the world. Thousands of children have been, and continue to go through, the offline Academy and have gone on to be very successful as young adults. We have a joint vision to see the same happen for thousands more kids across the globe.
The problem had always been, how to “deliver” the programme in an engaging way to meet child and parent aspirations not just for short-term engagement but to stimulate long-term involvement.
This would then allow every child to develop in their own time with guidance through an App alongside parental help. Essentially, the core idea is that via the App we guide the parents to teach, play and engage with their child, promoting strong family bonds whilst allowing the child to put the pieces of the puzzle together themselves and “Find the Dragon” inside them.
We believe that only NOW this can happen due to the recent, rapid progression of Generative AI and its myriad of uses and techniques from text-to-audio and transcription tools to text-to-image and most recently, text-to-video.
Bolt, with its ability to help produce a sophisticated App including its ability to interface with these other AI tools, allows us to reach and stimulate a world-wide audience, in their own local languages even, and to operate a fully integrated programme with a comprehensive monthly membership subscription model to underpin that operation.
With the child engaging with their own, individual, AI enhanced Dragon Master we can take them on a journey of learning which involves quests and constant “wins” as it leans heavily on the principles of gamification to stimulate and inspire them for years to come.
Only through the medium of AI are we now able to take our unique, and already highly successful system of training, and introduce it in a creative way to households throughout the world. It will help children to understand “who they are going to be” with a strong moral code and clear understanding of what will make the best version of themselves ready to lead and thrive in the adult world.
Although long and detailed in the thought and planning process, the App being submitted today is our initial MVP for iDragons Academy (online) — created specially for this Hackathon — and comprises our first step towards fulfilling the needs of this deep, complex and comprehensive children’s training programme.
What it does
The iDragons Web App is a proof of concept to test the core idea of delivering what we call The Fun Filled Programme to kids and their adults.
The App allows an adult to sign up, add their child's name and age, and select an avatar for them. This gives them instant access to "Module 1" which will always be free to every family.
This module introduces the kids to the core Training Path content (the bulk of which is currently under development) and includes video lessons to watch and to follow along. The kids will be encouraged to listen closely and to copy what they see and hear in their living rooms as in the future, they may be asked to submit videos of themselves performing the activities (which is more important for the formal Kung Fu Training Path introduced later in their training).
Along The Fun Filled Programme path, as the child completes the lessons, the App records their progress, assigns Experience Points (XP), and once they complete a whole module they are given a new puzzle piece. For The Fun Filled Programme there are 9 pieces to find so it will take time for them to do so. After all, learning what we need to teach them is a process, not a quick win.
To unlock Modules 2-9 of this first programme, the parent will need to subscribe to a membership plan which is currently a monthly fee of $29 and handled via Bolt's integration with Stripe and Supabase. The parent can manage their plan via Stripe's customer portal including the option to switch to an annual plan — via the App's checkout page — which will auto-cancel their monthly plan and save them 20% per year.
We are also currently planning out how to handle and charge for 2+ kids in the same household. We may just allow any number of family members to have an account and train for free as long as the first child is covered. We encourage siblings to train together in offline classes as it helps them all along their training path so why not do the same online?
How we built it
My (Glenn) main goal was to make sure I only used tools which helped Bolt build to the best of its abilities so that I could save time, tokens, and really test what Bolt could do for iDragons as well as showing off what Bolt could do to anyone else who might be interested.
To start, I knew that I wanted to use the React & Vite combo as it would play nicely with Supabase. To create a new barebones starter project in Bolt, I turned to my prototyping tool to make sure that the Bolt project was set up to work with the prototype as efficiently as possible. In subframe.com, I created the components and design system I would need to build the UI / pages fast in Bolt. I then made use of Subframe's prompts to instruct Bolt what to put in place as starting points for the pages (dumb components basically — similar to 21st.dev's approach) before actually making the components do what they needed to do.
I worked one page at a time, building out all the features in Bolt as we considered — using Discuss mode — the best approach for each feature. As we uncovered underlying React libraries and the need for integrations along the way, I created accounts (e.g. Supabase, Stripe) and worked with Bolt's plans to implement everything, one small feature at a time.
Wherever possible, I used Bolt's suggestions for the database migrations, RLS rules and other Supabase changes which worked 95%+ of the time and I was very impressed. I also used the GitHub native integration to create Feature Branches and Pull Requests to create a safe process for handling the more complex feature sets like the custom video player component in our App.
Finally, the Stripe integration worked so well that I managed to prompt Bolt to create the subscription / membership plan flow with very few issues which is hard to achieve because typically, as soon as ecommerce is added to a project the level of complexity increases 10-fold! Bolt auto-created the Products, Checkout and other pages based on the subscription product I had set up for the App in Stripe, added the necessary tables, edge functions and webhooks in Supabase, and Bolt even helped me to resolve a callback error from Stripe by suggesting a redirect mechanism which worked first time.
The combination of Discuss mode + small feature builds made the process extremely efficient and robust with very few errors encountered along the way. This was also partly due to Bolt's Dynamic Reasoning mode which I kept on the whole time as it was worth the extra wait. I left the Diff mode off as I found this to be less reliable on a previous Bolt project and time is of the essence here!
Challenges we ran into
From a technical point of view, I had very few challenges to be honest as the build went very smoothly. My biggest challenge was creating the custom video player as I worked through the requirements with Bolt. Together, we tried to create a modal to show the videos but with multiple videos to show on the page, we struggled to resolve race conditions and other technical complexities. After I rolled back, we took a different approach which was to embed the multiple video player instances on the page and that instantly solved the problems we were having.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I (Glenn) am pleased that despite only having used Bolt on one previous project, which was nothing like the current App, I was able to dive in quickly and build what I needed in a relatively short space of time and with only about 10 million credits so this has felt extremely efficient.
I did a fair amount of research before diving in and building including looking at the use of Figma's MCP server for translating component designs from Figma to Bolt but it wasn't the right workflow for me. Rather, I wanted scaffolds / prototyped components and layouts which I could give to Bolt as its barebones starting point, for us to then build the actual features on top together, and it worked REALLY well.
I am also a new user of Supabase and I have managed to get on with it very well thanks to Bolt's native integration. It has made learning the core concepts of Supabase a lot easier being able to co-build with Bolt especially when following its implementation plans.
Overall, building an MVP of a custom teaching platform that has elements of gamification, lesson tracking, awarding of points, membership plan subscription and management, and a friendly UI/UX in just 2 weeks has felt extremely fulfilling. We can't wait to get this launched to the public soon!
As Steve says: "at last we are able to get into the minds of children and offer them a fun, playful programme via the App that teaches them a whole range of mental, physical and emotional skills. We have also made the bridge between parenting and parenting skills without being overly prescriptive. We always want to help parents with a set of play tools which will allow them to strongly bond with their child whilst watching them engage and develop and this App does exactly that".
What we learned
Probably the biggest realisation as we dive deeper into Generative AI, and specifically what Bolt can offer us in building our vision, is that what we create is only limited by our imagination: us as the iDragons team AND what the Bolt team can come up with next!
We know exactly what works in our IRL classes and now we are able to translate this to a comprehensive range of visual and audio modules that will stimulate and engage whilst inspiring our online Dragons and their parents to keep going.
We are currently exploring the use of character morphing, lip-syncing, language translation and much, much more in relation to the actual content for the App which will allow us to reach and teach a much wider audience, many of whom we would not have considered in the past.
What's next for "iDragons Academy: a Training App for Kids & their Parents"
Our mission is to truly empower as many kids as possible by reaching into the minds of parents around the world who, like us, just want to give their children the opportunity to be the best they can be.
We do this by leveraging as many AI tools as possible as well as other cutting edge technologies like full 3D body tracking systems like Move.ai, emerging augmented reality tech, remote interactive teaching approaches using tools like HeyGen, AI video tools like Kling, and much more to create the most compelling content and App experience we can build.
Before we can formally launch the MVP, for example, we need to create the first set of Lessons for Module 1 which will be free to all users who sign up. We will then continue to create the content for Modules 2-9 which will round off The Fun Filled Programme and gain us our first cohort of paying customers. Our initial goal is 1,000 paying customers over the next 3-6 months.
We will start by leveraging our existing customer base — the parents of the kids who attend IRL classes with us. We will be encouraging those parents (around 150 families at present) to share the new App across their socials as well as creating marketing material + paid ads to reach our well defined audiences online.
Once we have gained enough traction and proven the financial model, we will move onto creating the Full Dragons Kung Fu Training path (mentioned in the current App but flagged as "Coming soon..."). This has been taught in our IRL classes to teenagers and adults alike for decades and so again, it is a very well established, proven, successful programme which is a natural follow-on path to The Fun Filled Programme. As we have done with many of our students, we can take our App users right through our programmes from age 4 to age 18 and beyond!
Talking of which, we also teach Tai Chi IRL to all age groups so we have plans for a second App called, "iTaiChi" which will draw on a lot of the same engine behind iDragons. From there, we have discussed other potential Apps we could create and deliver to hungry worldwide audiences from iTap (Tap Dancing — we have 2 Gold Team GB World Champion kids in our Dragons family so we know a lot about this discipline too!) to iBreathe, iRelax, iSing and others. There's no stopping us now thanks to Gen AI and especialy Bolt.
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