Maze Generator

What happens when you press generate

The maze is carved with a recursive backtracker. Starting from one corner, the algorithm walks to a random unvisited neighbour, knocks down the wall between them, and keeps going until it hits a dead end, at which point it backtracks and looks for another opening. When every cell has been visited the result is a spanning tree: every cell is reachable, and there is exactly one route between any two cells. Start and End are marked S and E, and the solution is found with a breadth first search, so the highlighted path on the answer page is the shortest one.

Difficulty then applies a second pass called braiding. Braiding finds dead ends and knocks out one extra wall, turning a dead end into a loop. Easy braids heavily, which strips out most dead ends and leaves a maze with several ways around. Medium braids lightly. Hard braids not at all, leaving the pure tree with the maximum number of dead ends. Because braiding only adds connections, a braided maze is still always solvable.

Sizes, and who each one suits

Eight sizes are offered, beginning at 10 by 10 and rising through 12, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35 and 40 cells on a side. The cell drawing size shrinks as the grid grows so the page stays the same, which means a 40 by 40 maze has noticeably narrow corridors.

For Foundation and Year 1, use 10 by 10 on Easy. The corridors are wide enough for a chunky pencil or a finger trace, and the loops mean fewer frustrating restarts. Year 2 and Year 3 suit 12 by 12 or 15 by 15 on Easy or Medium. Year 4 to Year 6 handle 20 by 20 on Medium, or 25 by 25 on Hard for students who want a genuine challenge. Sizes of 30 by 30 and above are best kept for older students, relief day folders and adult puzzle pages, and they are worth checking on paper before you photocopy because fine lines can close up on an older copier.

Pencil width matters more than you would think

If students are using thick graphite or textas, stay at 20 by 20 or below. A 35 by 35 maze drawn with a marker becomes unsolvable on the page even though the maze itself is fine. This is the most common reason a printed maze feels harder than it looked on screen.

A worked example: an early finisher folder

Suppose you keep a tray of activities for students who finish set work early, and you want six sheets that last a term for a Year 3 class. Generate a 12 by 12 on Easy, a 15 by 15 on Easy, two 15 by 15 on Medium and two 20 by 20 on Medium, giving each a title such as "Maze 1" through "Maze 6" so students can track which ones they have done. Print each with its solution page, keep the six solution pages together in the folder, and laminate the puzzle sheets with a whiteboard marker clipped to the tray so they can be reused.

Because every generation is different, you can refresh the whole tray next term in a few minutes without repeating a single maze. Our guide on mazes for early finishers has more on running this kind of tray without it becoming a reward system.

Differentiation without a different worksheet

Difficulty and size are two independent dials, which gives more range than it first appears. A large grid on Easy is a long but forgiving maze, good for a student who needs persistence practice rather than problem solving. A small grid on Hard is short but genuinely tricky, which suits a student who finishes quickly and needs something to think about rather than something long.

Beyond the maze itself, the sheet can carry a task. Ask students to count the dead ends they entered before finding the route, which quietly turns it into a tally activity. Ask them to mark the path in one colour and any wrong turn in another, then compare with the solution page. For a maths link, have students estimate the number of cells on the correct path, then count it from the answer key and work out the difference as a percentage of their estimate.

Printing it properly

Use a desktop browser for printing, set the paper to A4 portrait, keep margins on their default setting, and allow the page to scale to fit rather than forcing full size. The output is two pages: the maze, then the solution with the path highlighted. Print page one alone if you do not want students finding the answer key on the back of their sheet, which is the usual reason a maze gets solved suspiciously fast.

Background themes need "background graphics" ticked in the print dialogue. On a maze this is worth thinking about, because a busy theme behind thin corridor walls can make the route harder to read. Keeping the opacity slider low, or using no background at all for grids above 25 by 25, keeps the walls crisp. Our worksheet printing guide goes further into margins and scaling.

Licence position, stated plainly

Personal, homeschool and classroom activity is free, including running off a set for the whole class. Mazes printed or downloaded without a paid plan show a faint tiled ZillaKit.com marking over the page and a credit line near the footer. The maze PNG and the solution PNG both carry it.

Premium clears that marking, opens up custom background uploads, and carries a commercial licence covering sale and publication: maze books, paid activity packs, products of any kind. Nothing produced without that licence may be resold. If a book is the goal, the guide to selling a puzzle book on KDP covers page counts, trim sizes and how solution pages are usually arranged.

Related tools

The Word Search Maker and Sudoku Generator fill out the same activity folder, and the Large Print Maker helps if you are preparing materials for students who need bigger, higher contrast pages.

Questions about the mazes