Word Maze Maker

What a printed word maze looks like

A title, a line for a name and a date, and one sentence of instructions, then a grid of squares with a letter in each. START is the outlined square in the top left corner and FINISH the outlined square at the bottom right. The solver begins on START, steps up, down, left or right to a square holding the next letter of the word, and keeps going, never using a square twice, until FINISH.

Grids run from 6 by 8 squares to 12 by 15 for letters, and from 4 by 5 to 7 by 9 for sight words, where each square is wider to hold a whole word. The squares are outlined in light gray so it is easy to see which ones touch, and the letters are large and bold.

The answer key is the same grid again with the path drawn through it as a wide gray band under the letters, on a page of its own and without any border, so it costs little ink and can stay on the teacher’s desk.

How every maze is checked for one path

A letter maze with two routes is broken in a way nobody notices until a child takes the other one and is marked wrong. So before a maze is shown, a search tries every route from START that follows the rule, never reusing a square, and counts them, stopping at two. A maze is only kept when that count is exactly one and the one route is the path the maker laid.

The path is laid so it cannot offer itself a shortcut: no square of the route sits beside an earlier route square that needs its letter next. The letters around it are then checked one by one, and any that would let a walk from START reach FINISH some other way are changed. A maze that still fails the count is thrown away and another is made, inside a fixed number of attempts, so the same settings always give the same maze.

Easy, medium and hard letter mazes

Easy fills the other squares with letters that are not in the message, so a child following PUMPKIN never sees a stray P or K and the path never forks. For the alphabet, which uses every letter, easy instead makes sure no square beside the path holds the letter the path needs next.

Medium takes about two thirds of its other letters from the message itself and adds false trails, one for roughly every twelve squares of route, that start spelling the message for two or three squares and stop. Hard draws its other letters from the message alone, turning to another letter only where every letter of the message would open a second route, adds a trail for about every seven squares, and makes them three to five squares long.

The difference shows in how many wrong turns there are. With the maker’s opening message, HELLO, 300 mazes on an 8 by 10 grid averaged no squares beside the route offering the next letter on easy, 5.5 on medium and 6.6 on hard. On 12 by 15 the figures were 11.6 on medium and 14.8 on hard.

Sight word paths to color in

Switch Kind of maze to Sight word path and every square holds a short word instead of a letter. The path is the squares holding one word, such as the or was, and the job is to color each of them; the colored squares join up into a single track from START to FINISH. The track never touches itself, so it reads as one clear line once it is colored.

The other squares hold words from the Dolch sight word lists. Easy picks words that start with another letter and look nothing like the target. Medium mixes in look-alikes, such as them or then for the, and drops two stray copies of the word away from the path. Hard uses look-alikes where there are enough of them and keeps the strays, then adds two short dead-end spurs of the word off the path. The smallest grid, 4 by 5, sometimes has room for only one stray. You can also type your own list of other words.

Why a short word is spelled over and over

The route covers about four in ten squares of the grid, so a short word has to repeat to get from START to FINISH: CAT on a 12 by 15 grid is spelled 24 times along a 72 square route. A longer message repeats fewer times: a sentence of eighteen letters runs once on the smallest grid and four times on the largest. In tests at every length, messages of up to 30 letters fit every grid from 8 by 10 up, and up to 28 fit the smallest.

The route always ends on the last letter of the message, so the word is never left half spelled at FINISH. Because a grid’s squares alternate like a checkerboard, some route lengths cannot end on the corner square; then FINISH sits one square to the left of it, and the sheet marks it either way.

Your message stays on your device

Everything is worked out in your browser. What you type is never sent anywhere and never added to the address of the page, so a child’s name or a class message does not travel to us, to an advertiser or to anyone else. The download and Print this sheet both use the maze already on your screen.

The other squares are also screened against the same list of rude words the word search filler uses, in all eight directions, so a decoy letter can never complete one by accident. Only the decoys are ever changed: a message is printed exactly as it was typed.