Maze Blueprint Mapping
Your child tapes a maze onto the floor and then draws it on paper as a plan, or draws the plan first and builds to it.
- Age
- 6 to 9, best at 6
- Setup
- 2 min
- Play
- 20 min or more
- Materials
- Household only
- Mess
- None
- You
- Set it up, then leave
Activity KG-A045
What you need
A roll of tape and squared paper is the whole list. The one decision worth making before you start is the unit, because a plan with no unit is a drawing.
- Masking tape or painter's tapex1 roll, 25 mm Or: skipping ropes and string laid out and weighted with books. Or a line of books laid end to end, which is what carpet wants. Masking tape lifts cleanly off a wooden or laminate floor and off short carpet. Test a 10 cm piece somewhere out of sight for ten minutes first, and skip packing tape and duct tape entirely, because they leave adhesive on wood and on painted skirting.
- Squared paper, 5 mmseveral sheets Or: rule your own grid of 2 cm squares. Or the back of a finished exercise book. The squares are what make it a plan rather than a picture. Counting four squares along because the wall was four shoes long is the whole switch this activity is built around.
- A pencil with a rubberx1 A plan is a thing that gets changed. In pen the first mistake is permanent, and a child who cannot undo a line stops redrawing, which is where all the thinking was.
- A marble, a small car or a toy figurex1 Or: a bottle top flicked along the floor. The maze needs a job. Get this from the door corner to the window corner is a rule that makes dead ends interesting instead of decorative.
- A length of string cut to 50 cmx1 Or: his own shoe, which is always to hand and never gets lost. One unit, used for everything, is what makes the drawing come out in proportion. Measuring one wall in shoes and the next in paces gives a plan that looks wrong and nobody can say why.
How to set it up
- Clear a patch of floor about two metres by two.2 min
- Put the tape, the paper, the pencil and the marble down together in the middle of it.20 sec
- Agree the unit out loud: one shoe length on the floor is one square on the paper.20 sec
- Say where the marble starts and where it has to get to, and then leave the room to it.20 sec
What to say and what to do
Say
One shoe is one square.
Walk it first, then draw it.
- Get him to stand on a chair and look down at the maze before the pencil comes out. The view from above is the whole of the difficulty here.
Do
- Give the maze a purpose before a single piece of tape goes down. A maze with a start, a finish and something that has to travel between them gets built with care; a maze with no job gets abandoned at the third wall.
- Take one photograph from directly above, standing on a chair, and leave the phone face up on the table next to the paper. The photograph is the bridge between the thing and the map, and it does more than any explanation.
- Build your own small maze alongside and ask him to map yours. Mapping somebody else's maze is much harder, because none of it is already in his head.
Let be
- Walls that are not straight and corners that are not square. Roughly right, in the right order and the right number, is the entire job of a plan.
- A plan drawn with the door at the top instead of the bottom. Choosing an orientation and holding to it all the way through is the thing that matters, not which one he chose.
- The scale drifting by the far side of the page. Counting the units is the practice, and a plan that comes out to scale is the by-product of doing it.
What it looks like when it is working
- He paces a wall and counts out loud before he draws it.
- She walks back to the floor to check something rather than guessing at the table.
- A start and a finish get marked on the paper without anyone suggesting it.
- He spots that the plan and the floor disagree, and then decides which of the two he is going to change.
What to expect at each age
At six
Builds a good maze with eight or ten walls and draws it recognisably, with the walls in the right order and the lengths by feel. Often draws the walls standing up, as seen from his own eye height.
The overhead view is the next thing, and it arrives by being seen. A photograph taken from a chair does most of the teaching on its own.
Lasts 20 to 30 minutes
At seven
Draws from above, counts paces along each wall and gets most lengths roughly proportional. Starts drawing the plan first and building to it, which is the harder direction.
Holding one unit consistently across a whole plan comes next, and it is what stops the far end of the page going out of shape.
Lasts 30 to 40 minutes
At eight and nine
Keeps a consistent scale across the whole sheet, adds a key and an arrow for north or for the door, and can hand the plan to somebody else to build from without speaking.
Mapping something that was never built for it is where this goes: the kitchen, the flat, the route to school.
Lasts 40 minutes or more, often across two sittings
When it goes sideways
Each of these is the gap between the floor and the paper showing you where the difficulty actually sits, and each one has a move that takes a minute.
The drawing looks nothing like the maze
The plan is being drawn from the memory of walking through it, which stores turns and surprises rather than lengths and positions.
Go back and pace each wall together, and write the number on the tape itself with a pen. With the numbers on the floor, the drawing comes out right on the next attempt.
She drew it from above but the walls are standing up
Drawing a wall as a wall is what she can actually see. The overhead view is a convention that has to be met before it can be used, and almost nobody invents it unprompted.
Stand on a chair together and look straight down, then take a photograph from up there and put it beside the paper. One look at the real thing from above does what a page of explanation does not.
He builds for twenty minutes and will not draw
The building is the reward and the drawing has landed as the homework that comes after it.
Reverse the order next time. Draw the plan first and build to it, and the drawing becomes a set of instructions with an obvious purpose rather than a record of something already finished.
Every route is a dead end
The walls went down one at a time, each one interesting on its own, with nobody testing the whole thing.
Send the marble through after every third wall. Testing as you build is the habit worth having here, and it turns the maze into something that is being made to work rather than being decorated.
Making it harder
Four rungs on the same roll of tape. The direction reverses halfway up, which is where it gets properly demanding.
Build it, then draw it
- Ready when
- This is where everybody starts.
- What changes
- A taped maze of eight to ten walls, and a sheet of paper afterwards. No scale, just the right walls in the right places.
- What is new
- That a thing on the floor and a drawing on paper can be the same thing.
One shoe, one square
- Ready when
- His drawing has the walls in the right order and the right number.
- What changes
- The same maze, paced out, with each wall counted in shoe lengths and drawn that many squares long.
- What is new
- A unit held constant across a whole drawing, which is what proportion is made of.
Draw first, then build
- Ready when
- She can map a maze she did not build herself.
- What changes
- A blank sheet, a plan drawn before any tape comes off the roll, then the maze built to match it.
- What is new
- The plan stops recording and starts instructing, and every mistake in it shows up on the floor.
Hand the plan to somebody else
- Ready when
- He builds accurately from his own plan without needing to change it halfway.
- What changes
- He draws a plan, you build from it, and neither of you talks while you do it.
- What is new
- A drawing that has to carry everything on its own, which is the point where it becomes a real blueprint.
Take a photograph of the maze from above before the tape comes up, and keep it clipped to the plan. A stack of five plans with five photographs is the best possible argument for building a sixth.
How to keep it safe
It is tape and a floor, and three lines cover the lot.
- Test a short piece of tape on a hidden patch of floor for ten minutes before taping out two metres of it. Masking and painter's tape come off wood and laminate cleanly; packing and duct tape do not.
- Keep the maze away from the top of any stairs and out of the doorway people come through, since the whole point is that somebody will be moving along it while looking down.
- Bare feet or grippy socks on a smooth floor. Plain socks and a polished floor are a fast combination, and this game involves running the route.
- If there is a toddler in the house, send a toy car through the maze instead of a marble, and put the marbles away at the end of the sitting.
Why this helps
The thing being practised here is the translation between an object and a symbol of it. A maze on the floor is walked through at eye level, in sequence, one turn at a time. A plan of it is seen all at once, from above, from a viewpoint nobody has ever occupied. Getting from one to the other means holding the whole layout in mind at a size it was never experienced at, and that is the single move underneath map reading, floor plans, circuit diagrams and most of geometry.
Reversing the direction is what makes this worth twenty minutes rather than five. Drawing a maze that already exists is a record, and it can be fudged. Building a maze from a plan drawn first is a prediction, and it cannot: the walls either land where the paper said or they do not, and the floor gives the verdict immediately. A child who has had a plan of his own turn out to be wrong, and has then fixed the plan rather than the floor, has understood something about drawings that is hard to arrange any other way.
Skill practised: moving between a thing and a scaled map of the thing
This is not a geometry lesson with tape on it. A six year old builds a maze because he wants somewhere for the marble to go, and the plan is how he keeps the good ones.
One a week, at your child's age
We publish one new activity a week at each age, in exactly this format. The clip for this one is the overhead shot, because the difference between standing in a maze and looking down on it is the whole activity in two seconds.
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Questions parents ask
What tape is safe to use on the floor?
Masking tape or decorator's painter's tape, both of which lift off wood, laminate and tile without leaving anything behind. Test a short strip out of sight for ten minutes first, especially on an older varnished floor. On carpet or a rug, skip tape and lay the walls with string weighted by books, or with the books themselves end to end, which builds just as good a maze.
How big should the maze be?
About two metres by two, with eight to twelve walls, is the size that stays interesting and still fits on one sheet of paper. Much bigger and the pacing takes longer than the building, which is where six year olds lose the thread. A bigger version is a good thing to grow into once the plans are coming out accurate.
He builds happily but will not draw it afterwards.
Swap the order round and have him draw the plan before any tape comes off the roll, then build to the drawing. That makes the plan a set of instructions with a job to do rather than a write-up of something already finished, and it is also the harder and more interesting half of this activity.
Does it need squared paper?
It works far better with it, and 5 mm squares are the easiest size to count. If there is none in the house, rule a grid of 2 cm squares across a sheet of plain paper in about three minutes, which is also a decent job to hand to the child. The squares are what turn a drawing into a plan, so they are worth the three minutes.