Art is the soul of creativity in STEAM education, and building blocks serve as a boundless creative canvas for children, turning abstract artistic imagination into tangible physical creation and spurring free expression of creativity, aesthetic judgment and hands-on ability. In the integration of building blocks and STEAM art education, there is no fixed “right answer” or rigid creation standard—every child can build unique works based on their own imagination, which perfectly fits the core of art education: to respect individual creativity and cultivate the ability to perceive beauty, express beauty and create beauty. Building blocks break the limitations of traditional art tools such as paint and paper, making art creation more three-dimensional, interactive and exploratory, and letting children experience the fun of artistic creation in the process of stacking, splicing and reconstructing bricks.
Building blocks lay the foundation of aesthetic perception for children from an early age through the combination of shape, color and structure. Different shapes of bricks (square, round, triangular, curved) bring diverse visual experiences, and rich color matching (warm colors, cool colors, complementary colors) lets children intuitively feel the harmony and contrast of colors. When children build a brick flower, they will choose pink and yellow for petals and green for stems according to their perception of natural beauty; when building a castle, they will match white and blue to create a fairy-tale aesthetic feeling. In this process, children will unconsciously learn to observe the beauty of the world, distinguish color matching and structural beauty, and gradually form their own initial aesthetic judgment. Even random free combination of building blocks can exercise children’s aesthetic intuition—they will constantly adjust the placement of bricks to make the work more visually comfortable, which is the initial practice of aesthetic creation.
What’s more, building blocks empower children’s diverse artistic expression beyond flat painting and drawing. Traditional art creation is mostly limited to two-dimensional flat space, while building blocks let children create in three-dimensional space, turning artistic ideas into three-dimensional works with length, width and height. Children can build abstract artworks with irregular combination of bricks, expressing their inner emotions and ideas through the shape, color and spatial structure of the works; they can also create realistic artistic models such as animals, plants and architectural landscapes, restoring the beauty of real things with bricks and exercising their ability of realistic creation. In addition, building blocks can be combined with other art materials (such as stickers, colored paper, paint) for mixed creation—for example, painting patterns on brick surfaces and matching with colored paper to build a “colorful forest”, which enriches the forms of artistic expression and cultivates children’s cross-material creative thinking.
Building blocks also cultivate children’s artistic innovation and iterative thinking in the process of trial and error creation. When a child is not satisfied with the initially built brick work, they will take it apart and rebuild it, adjust the shape and color matching, and try different creative ideas—this process of “creation-dissatisfaction-reconstruction-optimization” is the iterative thinking in artistic creation. Unlike traditional art works that are not easy to modify after completion, building blocks have the characteristics of easy disassembly and reassembly, which greatly reduces the cost of creative trial and error. Children can boldly try various unconventional creative methods without worrying about “ruining the work”, and even create unexpected artistic effects through accidental combination. This bold exploration and continuous optimization not only stimulate children’s artistic innovation ability, but also let them understand that art creation is a process of continuous exploration and improvement, laying a good foundation for their future artistic learning and creative practice.
In the context of STEAM education, the integration of building blocks and art is not only to cultivate children’s painting or handcraft ability, but also to integrate artistic creativity into interdisciplinary learning. When children build a “solar system model” with building blocks, they combine astronomical knowledge with artistic creation, making the model both scientific and visually beautiful; when building a “ecological community”, they integrate environmental science knowledge with structural art, realizing the deep integration of art and other STEAM disciplines. This interdisciplinary artistic creation makes children understand that art is not an independent subject, but a creative tool that can be combined with various disciplines, and further stimulates their comprehensive creative thinking in STEAM learning.