I just finished Dan Pink’s book A Whole New Mind in which he discusses the difference between a maze and a labyrinth. It made me think of this wonderful video of dissecting a maze to solve it:

This was created by David Chandler of www.MathWithoutBorders.com and shared through the Math Future Google Group.

Creating a maze becomes easy do-able!

From the discovery that David and his class of Math Explorers made, I learned that you can take two colors and create a maze. So off I went…

I’ve been dying to use this elementary school graph paper I got the other day so out it came. I grabbed a purple marker and started:

I immediately began creating the “rules” of what would be good maze design. And almost as quickly I began seeing that I was all wrong.

After a while I got out the orange marker:

More rules… more “…no, that’s not really a requirement” thoughts from me.

After a while I just gave up on making rules and decided to make sure that my purple and orange would come out at some point together.

Then with a little photoshop magic, I made it all black. You can download it here and play it!

Okay, your turn!

This might not be something to teach, but rather something to do at home together. It’ll be a learning experience for the whole family.

Grab anything with lines or a grid on it and two different color pens or markers and give it a shot. Let me know how it goes. You can even post a link to the pictures of them in the comments!

Check out the interview with David Chandler here.

This is also shared in Works For Me Wednesday.

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