Guide
How to make a maze and activity book for children
A children activity book is bought by an adult, used by a child, and judged by both. The adult wants it to last a car journey. The child wants to finish a page and feel clever. That means variety, a difficulty ramp measured in years rather than levels, and lines thick enough for a crayon.
Short answer
Mix four page types rather than printing sixty mazes: mazes, dot-to-dot, tracing and matching. Carve mazes with a depth-first search and check every one has a solution by walking it. Scale difficulty by age, not by a label: 8x8 cells at ages 4 to 6, 12x12 at 7 to 9, 20x20 at 10 and up. Use heavy line weights and print at 8.5 x 11 inches.
How a maze is actually made
A maze that a person draws by hand tends to be unfair: dead ends of wildly different lengths, a solution that hugs one edge, corridors that go nowhere interesting. A maze carved by algorithm is fair by construction.
The standard approach is a randomised depth-first search, described in any treatment of maze generation algorithms. Begin with a grid of cells all walled off from each other. Stand in one cell, pick a neighbour you have not visited, knock down the wall between, and move there. When every neighbour has been visited, back up to the previous cell and try again. When you have backed all the way out, the maze is finished.
What you get is a perfect maze: exactly one route between any two cells, no loops, no unreachable pockets. That matters for a children book, because it guarantees the maze has a solution and that the solution is unique. Then walk the maze with a breadth-first search from entrance to exit: that gives you the answer to print in the back, and the path length, which is the honest measure of how hard the maze is.
Difficulty in years, not stars
| Age | Grid | Solution path | What else on the page |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 to 5 | 6x6 to 8x8 | Short, mostly forward | A picture to colour at the exit |
| 6 to 8 | 10x10 to 12x12 | A few dead ends | Something to count or find |
| 9 to 11 | 16x16 | Long, with false corridors | A timer box to write their time in |
| 12 and up | 20x20 and larger | Deliberately misleading | Nothing; the maze is the point |
Put the age band on the cover and mean it. Parents buy by age, and a book that says "ages 4 to 8" and opens with a 20x20 grid gets returned.
Four page types, rotated
The fastest way to lose a child is to give them the same puzzle sixty times. Rotate:
- Mazes for problem solving.
- Dot-to-dot for number or letter order, which teaches sequence while it draws a picture. Number the dots large enough to read, and keep the count matched to the age: twenty dots at five, sixty at nine.
- Tracing for letter and shape formation. Print the guide in a soft grey, not black, so the child sees their own line on top of it. This is the single most common mistake in a home-made activity book, and it makes the page useless.
- Matching for vocabulary and attention: two columns, a line to draw between pairs.
Four types in rotation also stretches the useful age band of the book, because a child who finds the mazes hard can still finish the tracing.
Drawing for small hands
Everything on a children page should be heavier than it would be for an adult. Maze walls around 2 points. Tracing guides around 3 points in 30 percent grey. Generous margins, because children do not stay inside the lines and a maze that runs to the paper edge will be finished on the table.
Because all of this is line work, draw it as vector and the page prints sharp at any size, on a home printer or a press. An image-based page at 300 DPI, the minimum Amazon accepts, is already at its limit; a drawn page has no limit.
Publishing and who buys it
Two different buyers, two different products.
- A paperback is a gift and a car-journey object. Matte cover, 8.5 x 11 inches, perforation is not available so do not promise tear-out pages.
- A printable PDF is bought by parents and teachers who want to print one page twenty times. This is the better product for classroom use, and it sells on Etsy and on Teachers Pay Teachers, where a basic seller keeps 55 percent of the list price and a premium seller 80 percent.
Neubook draws mazes with a depth-first carve, checks each one by walking the solution, and mixes in dot-to-dot, tracing and matching pages so no two pages in a row ask the same thing. Say the age and the page count.
Start a set, freeSources
- Maze generation algorithms
- Breadth-first search, used to solve the maze
- Amazon KDP paperback submission guidelines
- Etsy seller fees and payment policy
- Teachers Pay Teachers seller fees and payout rates
- SVG, the vector format these pages are drawn in
Common questions
How are mazes generated?
The usual method is a randomised depth-first search: start in one cell, walk to a random unvisited neighbour knocking down the wall between them, and back up when stuck. This produces a perfect maze, meaning exactly one path between any two points and no loops. The solution is then found with a breadth-first search, which also tells you how long the path is.
How difficult should a maze be for a given age?
Judge by grid size and path length rather than by a word. Four to six year olds manage an 8x8 grid with a short, obvious path. Seven to nine year olds want 12x12 with a few dead ends. Ten and up can take 20x20 with long false corridors. A maze that takes an adult a minute is far too hard for a five year old.
Should an activity book be all mazes?
No. Children abandon repetition faster than adults. Rotate through mazes, dot-to-dot, tracing and matching pages so that no two consecutive pages ask for the same thing. It also widens the age band the book suits.
How thick should the lines be?
Thicker than feels right on screen. A child draws with a crayon or a fat pencil, and a hairline maze wall disappears under it. Around 2 points for maze walls and 3 for tracing guides works on paper, and tracing lines should be a soft grey rather than black so the child can see their own mark on top.
Can I sell a children activity book on Amazon?
Yes, through the ordinary paperback flow. The interior is a PDF, at least 24 pages and an even number. Consider a matte cover: activity books get handled hard, and gloss shows every fingerprint.