Maze Generator

What you get

One maze on one sheet of US Letter paper, with a Name and Date line at the top and the way in on the left and the way out on the right. The solution prints on a second page, so you can hand out the puzzle without it.

Every maze has exactly one route through. There are no loops and no dead-end shortcuts that secretly rejoin the path later, which means a child who follows a wrong turn will always hit a dead end rather than wandering in a circle. That is what makes a maze solvable rather than frustrating.

Mazes are drawn as lines rather than images, so they print sharp at any size and use very little ink.

Choosing a size

Easy is twelve squares across. The corridors are wide, the route is short, and most four to six year olds can finish one without help. It is also the right size if you are printing for someone who will use a thick marker or a crayon.

Medium is eighteen squares and takes a few minutes. This is the everyday size for a class set or a activity sheet.

Hard is twenty-six squares. The corridors get narrow enough that a pencil is better than a crayon, and the route doubles back often enough to be genuinely absorbing for an adult.

You can also step the size up or down by one square at a time if none of the three presets is quite right. Below about ten squares a maze stops being much of a puzzle; above thirty the corridors are too narrow to draw a line in on Letter paper, which is why that is the limit.

Ways to use them

Mazes are a genuinely useful pencil-control exercise. Staying inside the corridor without crossing a wall is fine motor practice, and unlike a handwriting sheet it does not feel like practice. For that purpose the easy size is better than the hard one — you want the child drawing steadily, not squeezing through gaps.

They also work as a quiet-time activity that needs no reading, which makes them useful for a mixed-age group or for a child who is not reading confidently yet. A maze asks nothing of vocabulary.

In a classroom they are worth keeping in the early-finisher folder for the same reason word searches are: no explaining and no marking. Print a few of each difficulty and let children pick their own level.

At home the harder sizes hold up well for adults. A twenty-six square maze is a reasonable ten minutes.

Printing notes

Print at 100 per cent rather than Fit to Page. Scaling a maze thins the walls and can make two corridors look joined when they are not.

Black and white is the right choice and costs almost nothing in ink — the whole puzzle is thin black lines on white.

If you are printing the harder sizes for young children, check one first. What looks fine on a screen can be tighter on paper than you expect.