Maze

We've started doing passive programming in the children's area of my library quite recently, and the month of March was my turn to create one of these programs.  Here's what I came up with:

I found this maze* online just by Googling "mazes" and looking at the image results.  I tried to pick a maze that had bold lines.  It couldn't be too hard (I didn't want younger kids to be discouraged), but I didn't want it to be too hard but not too easy either (didn't want it too boring for older kids).  The image size also had to be fairly large so that it would print crisply after enlarging it.

I used Microsoft Publisher to blow the image up to poster size and added the start and finish words/arrows.  When it was ready, the maze was printed on nine sheets of tabloid-size paper.  I assembled the maze, trimmed the margins as needed, and mounted it on several more sheets of red construction paper.

Once the maze was created and assembled I just hung it up on the wall.  Kids who came by could just use their eyes or a finger to find their way through the maze.  Easy!

To track participation, I also posted a sign asking them to come to us at the Children's Desk when they finished so that they could get a marble to add to the jar on the shelf nearby (not pictured).  It's amazing how well this actually worked.  Only a handful of known participants failed to come up for their marble (we'd add a marble ourselves if we noticed), and some of the younger kids were surprisingly excited about adding a marble to the jar.  At the end of the month I just counted the number of marbles in the jar to get a number to include with our program statistics.

I would absolutely call this program a success.  We had 92 marbles in the jar at the end of the month, which is a fantastic number.   What I especially liked was that this maze was a quick thing to do - most kids only needed a minute or two to find their way to the end - but it was still lots of fun.  To me, that's the perfect recipe for successful passive programming.



*I may or may not have violated some sort of copyright law by using the image of the maze in this way.  Honestly, I am never quite sure what qualifies as "fair use" and what qualifies as infringement, so I decided to just go with the best image I could find.  Judge all you like.  And if you're the creator if this maze and you're mad that I used it, please know that I'm very sorry and intended no harm.  And if anyone wants to better explain how "fair use" does/does not work, I'm all ears.