Mazes
Draw and test a small paper maze of your own
After solving a few mazes, designing one can reveal why some layouts work and others fail. You do not need to reproduce Panlore’s maze algorithm. A small hand-drawn grid is enough to explore entrances, walls, dead ends and the difference between an intended route and an actual one.
Begin with an entrance, an exit and a route
Draw a 6 × 6 square grid on scrap paper. Mark an entrance above the top-left cell and an exit below the bottom-right cell. Sketch a light route that moves between neighboring cells, going up, down, left or right. Do not use a diagonal jump through the corner of a square.
Treat the grid lines as possible walls. Erase or open the boundary whenever the route passes from one cell to the next. Keep a rough copy showing the intended route so you can check it later. If the route is hard to trace even on this rough copy, simplify it before adding branches.
Add branches without accidentally creating shortcuts
From a cell already on the route, open a passage into an unused neighboring cell. Continue into unused cells for a short branch, then stop. If you want a maze without loops, do not reconnect that branch to another already connected cell. Keep every other boundary closed.
Each time a new cell joins through just one open boundary, it extends the connected network without creating a loop. Opening a second connection can create an alternate route. That is not automatically a bad design, but it changes whether you can claim there is only one solution.
Make a clean question copy and a matching answer
Draw the final walls clearly and remove the construction route from the question copy. Leave an obvious opening at START and FINISH. Copy the completed walls before tracing the solution on an answer version; rebuilding the maze from memory can introduce a subtle mismatch.
Ask another person to solve the question copy without seeing the construction sketch. They may discover an unintended opening or find that a wall was copied across the intended path. Check the actual drawing rather than insisting that the planned answer proves the maze is correct.
Revise one design choice
Choose one improvement after the test: wider passages, clearer start labels, a shorter initial branch or a more distinct junction. Redraw that feature and retest the route. A visually elaborate page is not necessarily a better puzzle if the walls cannot be read comfortably.
For comparison, open a Panlore maze and inspect its separate solution. Panlore’s generated mazes connect all cells without internal loops. Your hand-drawn version may leave some unused cells or allow alternate routes; describe those choices honestly. The purpose of this activity is to make and test a design, not to imitate a software guarantee by appearance alone.
Try this with Panlore
Preview each sheet and its answer key before sharing it. Adapt the activity to the people taking part.