Performing arts education plays an important role in the cultural literacy and physical and mental development of students in higher vocational colleges and universities. However, the existing classroom space layout often fails to meet the teaching needs and affects the learning efficiency of students. Traditional classroom space design does not take into account the multifunctional needs and personalized learning environment, resulting in unsatisfactory teaching results. This paper proposes a classroom space layout optimization method for performing arts majors based on genetic algorithms to enhance students’ learning efficiency through rational design of classroom space. The study uses five comparative algorithms to conduct experiments, and analyzes indicators such as space use efficiency, space adaptation and noise impact score. The results show that the optimized classroom space use efficiency reaches 91.41%, which is 38.19% higher than the traditional layout method; the space adaptability reaches 0.9472, indicating that the teaching function has been significantly improved; the noise impact score is the smallest at 0.105, which reduces the interference of the noise to students. The learning efficiency of students in the experimental group was improved by a significant difference over the control group (P=0.004). This study shows that the rational design of classroom space layout can not only improve the efficiency of space use, but also provide students with a more suitable learning environment, which can significantly improve the learning effect.
