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In the 21st century, along with fine arts, media art has become an important genre for young children. Undoubtedly, early visual arts give children a powerful language with which to express themselves aesthetically, cognitively and creatively through the use of symbolic representations. However, digital play remains a controversial issue in early childhood education, causing many schools to delay implementing digital arts. Recently, a number of international scholars have studied how digital technologies relate to children's learning experiences at school, arguing that open‐ended digital devices (eg, tablet computers, cameras and video recorders) may allow children to produce more creative content, such as drawings, photos and films. This study explored the role of video art in early visual arts education by using digital devices in a summer workshop in Hong Kong on video making, applying the digital play framework to the data collected. The findings revealed that the children who participated were able to explore the professional device through epistemic play. Meanwhile, they were able to use film language to share their toy‐playing stories and make their own 1‐minute video through ludic play. In this study, the children engaged in concurrent exploratory activities, using a digital video recorder and toys to create innovative and imaginative play. The findings of this study increase practitioners' and leaders' awareness of the role of digital play in early childhood education. What is already known about this topic? Digital arts initiatives in early childhood education have been discussed around the world; however, the implementation of digital arts learning projects has been a challenging undertaking in schools. The digital play framework has been introduced in the previous literature. This framework helps teachers observe, plan for and integrate the use of still‐camera technologies in play‐based learning. What this paper adds This study aims to offer practical advice on the integration of video art in children's digital play activities. It adopts a theoretical lens related to video making to examine techniques and engagement among children in the Asia‐Pacific region. It supplements the existing digital play framework with additional indicators associated with learning to use video cameras through play. Implications for practice and policy This study sheds new light on the application of open‐ended digital devices in children's play and learning. The results highlight the value of children's play in digital arts and the possibility of integrating digital arts into the early childhood curriculum in schools.

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Creativity, one of the cornerstones of students’ 21st-century skills, is regarded as an important learning outcome of science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) education. Meanwhile, problem-based digital making (DM), which combines the child-friendly programming activities of DM with problem-solving elements, is an emerging instructional design to facilitate STEAM learning. This qualitative case study examines the implementation of a problem-based DM instructional program that used the block-based programming tool Scratch to cultivate the participants’ creativity. Fifty-four middle school students (aged 10–14 years) in Hong Kong participated in the program, which totaled 10 contact hours over five consecutive weeks. Through triangulating students’ DM artifacts, video recordings, field notes, and interviews, the researchers characterized the students’ creative expression, examined the role of problem-based DM in encouraging creative work, and investigated the use of Scratch for mediating student creativity. The results showed that problem-based DM activities fostered students’ creative expressions in the dimensions of novelty, utility, aesthetics, and authenticity. While Scratch mediated the way the students presented their solutions, it had limitations that hindered the students’ digital artifact construction. The findings provide theoretical insights for framing creativity and offer practical implications for the implementation of problem-based DM in K–12 contexts.