Maze Maker – Solve It, Draw It, Print It

Why Mazes Are Good for Growing Brains

A maze looks like a simple puzzle, but it asks a child to do several things at once. They have to hold a goal in mind, look ahead along a path before committing to it, notice when they have walked into a dead end, and go back to the last place where they had a choice. Psychologists call this group of skills executive function: planning, working memory and flexible thinking. Mazes practise all three in a way that feels like play rather than work.

Mazes also build spatial reasoning, the ability to picture shapes, directions and routes in your head. Spatial reasoning is closely linked to later success in mathematics, especially geometry, measurement and reading graphs and maps. A child who can follow a corridor with their eyes, turn a corner in their mind and keep track of left and right is practising exactly the thinking they will later use to read a map of a zoo or rotate a shape on a grid.

Finally, mazes teach patience with mistakes. Nobody solves a large maze without trying a wrong turn. The useful habit is to treat a dead end as information, not failure: “that way doesn’t work, so the answer must be somewhere else.” Children who learn that calmly on a maze are better prepared for long division, debugging a program or redrafting a story.

How to Use This Page

1. Choose a size. The six sizes run from a 5 by 5 maze for kindergarten to a 22 by 22 maze for confident upper primary children.
2. Solve on the screen. Put a finger, a stylus or the mouse on the orange dot and slide along the paths to the flag. Walls stop the dot, and going back over your own trail rubs it out, just as you would with an eraser. The timer starts with your first move.
3. Stuck? Press Show the answer to see the way through as a dotted blue line. Press it again to hide it and try once more from where you are.
4. Make another. New maze makes a fresh one at the same size. Every maze has a number; type a number to get that exact maze again on any device.
5. Draw your own in the second box, check that it can be solved, then play it or hand the device to a friend.
6. Print one big maze, two or four to a page. The last page always shows the answers.

Ways to Solve Any Maze

Mazes have been around for thousands of years, and people have worked out a few reliable ways to beat them. They are worth teaching, because each one is a small algorithm: a set of steps that always works if you follow it carefully.

• The hand on the wall. Put one hand on a wall at the entrance and keep it there as you walk. In every maze made on this page, following one wall always leads to the finish, although it may visit a lot of dead ends on the way.
• Work backwards. Start at the finish and trace towards the start. In many mazes the end has fewer choices near it, so the path is easier to find from that side.
• Fill in the dead ends. On paper, shade every dead end back to the last junction. Keep doing it and only the true path is left unshaded. This is a lovely method for older children because it turns a hard maze into a patient colouring task.
• Look before you move. Before drawing anything, follow the path with your eyes as far as you can. Good maze solvers spend more time looking than drawing.

How a Computer Makes a Maze

The mazes on this page are made by a simple method that older children can understand and even act out. Imagine a grid of rooms with every wall standing. A little explorer starts in one room. At each step it picks, at random, a neighbouring room it has not visited yet, knocks down the wall between them and walks through. When it reaches a room with no unvisited neighbours, it walks back along its own trail until it finds a room that still has an unvisited neighbour, and carries on from there. When every room has been visited, the maze is finished.

Because the explorer never knocks into a room it has already visited, the maze has no loops: there is exactly one route between any two squares. Mathematicians call this a perfect maze, and computer scientists call the method a depth-first search. The random choices come from a number, the maze number, so the same number always makes the same maze. You can try the method with squared paper and a dice: roll to decide which way the explorer goes.

Round Mazes

Choose Round for a maze made of rings, like a target or a spider’s web. You start in the middle and look for the gap in the outside edge. Round mazes feel different from square ones: going round a ring can carry you a long way from where you meant to go, and the junctions where a ring splits into more cells are easy to miss. The same explorer method makes them, just on rings instead of rows, so every round maze also has exactly one way out. Further out, each ring has more cells than the one inside it, so the paths stay about the same width all the way from the middle to the edge. Try the same maze number as a square maze and as a round one and see which your child finds harder.

Ideas by Age

• K2 and P1: use the two smallest sizes. Let your child trace with a finger first, then with a crayon on a printed copy. Talk about directions: up, down, left, right, “turn at the corner”.
• P2 and P3: time each maze and try to beat the time on the next one at the same size. Ask your child to explain how they decided which way to go at a junction.
• P4 to P6: try the dead-end filling method on a printed 16 by 16 maze. Design mazes for younger brothers and sisters, with a fair number of dead ends but a sure way through, and check them with the page.
• In class: give everyone the same maze number and size for a quiet starter activity, or let pairs design a maze and swap.

Designing Your Own Maze

Making a maze is harder than solving one, and it is excellent thinking practice. A good maze has one clear route, several tempting wrong turns and no squares that cannot be reached. In the drawing box, start from Fill with walls and knock walls down to carve a single winding path from start to finish, then open a few short side passages as traps. Press Check my maze to make sure it can be solved. The page also tells you if some squares are shut off completely, which is allowed but usually means a wall is in the wrong place.

Nothing to Install, Nothing Uploaded

The maze maker runs entirely in your browser on any phone, tablet or computer, with no account and no download. The size you chose last is remembered on this device; mazes and drawings stay in your browser and are never uploaded.