I have a 5 yo that is very enthusiastic about Legos. It turns out that both directed and free play are good.

He gets new kits and starts by following the instructions. He learns techniques along the way. How to interlock to make things that are strong and won’t fall apart. Patterns for building subassemblies like body panels or spoilers.

As soon as he’s done following the instructions he takes the whole thing apart, and starts building his own creation with the pieces, applying the concepts he learned.

It’s kind of like music. You don’t learn to play piano by composing songs, you start by playing other people’s music to learn the fundamentals. Then you can start riffing on it.

A lot of kids fall into that bucket yes.

There’s also kids who need a bit of push at the start, and/or will go through a full build following the directives to see what they want to change, or how they’d build it better.

TBH I fall in the latter category, and take that approach for a lot of things. I.e. I’ll follow a coffee brewing recipe to the letter to see what it gives, and infinitely iterate from there, including taking completely different approaches to compare.

When I was a kid imagination filled in all the missing details of my lego build and it look awesome and amazing. Now that I am older I just look at them as a low resolution approximation of the real world and not as exciting it was before.

...can't you still do that, even with this app, if you want?