Are Mazes Good for Preschoolers? What a Child Does in a Maze

In 2014, Christoph Völter and Josep Call published a study that gave a maze in a box to 12 four-year-olds and 12 five-year-olds from kindergartens in Leipzig, Germany.

The box stood 47 cm high and 67 cm long, with a clear front. Inside were three levels. A bottle cap holding a small toy, such as stickers or marbles, sat on the top level. A child put a finger through slits in the front, slid the cap left or right, and dropped it through gaps to the next level down. There were ten gaps in all, and yellow traps blocked three of them. If the cap went into a trap, that attempt was over.

The experimenter called the box a “gift machine” and told the child about the slits and the two big holes at the bottom. Nobody explained how to get the toy out or what the traps did. The children quickly learned to avoid them anyway.

The authors looked closely at the first move. With a trap on the top level, a child could choose a direction by looking only at the current level. With the traps that mattered on the second level, the child had to look one level ahead before the first move, and on the third level, two levels ahead. Eight of the 12 four-year-olds and ten of the 12 five-year-olds did significantly better than chance on the first move overall. Among those children, by layout:

• Current level only: 8 four-year-olds, 10 five-year-olds
• One level ahead: 1 four-year-old, 7 five-year-olds
• Two levels ahead: no four-year-olds, 1 five-year-old

The five-year-olds scored 91% correct on current-level layouts and 60% on layouts two levels ahead. The authors point to shifting attention across a sequence of subgoals, more than handling the cap, as what limited the children.

Research on looking ahead, and what it leaves open

A task with no maze shows a similar age gap. Unterrainer and colleagues (2013) gave 45 four- and five-year-olds a touch-screen puzzle: move balls to match a goal arrangement, in three moves. Problems that needed no mental look-ahead were solved by most children, even the youngest. On problems that did need it, four-year-olds averaged below 50% correct.

All of this shows that scores on look-ahead tasks differ by age. In the Völter and Call experiment, scores rose in the second round with the same layouts, but that is a change within one experiment. The search for this article turned up no study comparing children who regularly play with mazes against children who do not to see whether looking ahead improves.

What a child does with one paper maze

Setting aside the question of benefits, here is what a child does while working through a maze.

They find the start and the finish. They can follow the path with their eyes or a finger before drawing, or work it out while the line is moving. At a fork they pick a side. At a dead end they come back and try the other way. Throughout, they keep the line inside the path, change direction at corners and slow down when a wall gets close. The line stops at the finish.

In the terms of that experiment, a child who follows a branch to its dead end before choosing is looking ahead, and a child who goes in and comes back is checking along the way. Both reach the finish.

Mazes as line practice

As line practice, a maze has a clear rule: the width of the path is how far the line can wander. The order of lines and the choice of tools are in Pre-Writing Strokes. A pencil on paper and a finger on a screen ask different things of the hand, which Does Drawing Build Fine Motor Skills? goes into.

What age to start

The CDC’s developmental milestones have no item for mazes. The closest are “draws a circle, when you show him how” by age 3 and “holds crayon or pencil between fingers and thumb (not a fist)” by age 4. None of the sources read for this article set an age for starting mazes.

The order below does not come from a study. It applies the points above to paper mazes.

One path. No forks, a wide path, two or three corners, so the line has to change direction. A child not yet holding a pencil can follow it with a finger.

A dead end you can see. One fork, with one short branch whose end is visible from the fork. This is close to the current-level layouts in the experiment.

A dead end around a corner. The branch turns once before it ends, so choosing at the fork means following it with the eyes one step further.

Forks after forks. The right path leads to another fork. Choosing correctly at the first one means looking two steps ahead, and in the experiment even five-year-olds’ scores dropped there. Going in and coming back also solves it.

Drawing one at home

A maze can be drawn by hand. Use a thick marker to draw one path from start to finish, then add two or three short branches off it, and the forks and dead ends are done. The child draws along the path with a crayon of another color. Longer branches with a bend hide the dead ends from the fork.

A child can also be the one making it. Drawing a path and adding branches means deciding where each dead end goes. When an adult solves the child’s maze, the roles swap.

Mazes in BrainDojo Kids

BrainDojo Kids is an iPhone and iPad app I make for ages 3 to 6, where children write on the screen with a finger or a pen to practice letters and numbers.

The training games include Easy Maze (from age 3) and Maze (from age 4), which has more paths. The child draws a line from the red circle at the top left to the blue circle at the bottom right without touching the walls. A session is five mazes, and the shapes change each time. Touching a wall or lifting the finger clears the line and the child starts again from the red circle. The line only begins when the red circle is touched, so there is time to follow the path by eye first. In Sugoroku Together, the family board game, a square can bring up Maze Battle: two players sit facing each other across the tablet, solve the same maze, and the first to the goal wins.

The three daily games in Today’s Training and the four Recommended games are free each day, and every other game can be tried once. In the parent settings there is a daily time limit, on by default at 10 minutes. There are no ads and no account to create. The app is free to start, and a Premium subscription (monthly or yearly) opens all courses and games. The first session is covered in Getting Started with BrainDojo Kids.