Solving a Simple Maze

Student Worksheet:
Design your own maze and solve it.. 

 You are working as a team of engineers who have been given the challenge to design a maze using the materials given to you, and then solve it. By this time, you might have already seen what a maze looks like, and some interesting maze solving robots. Before jumping into the real game, let’s get started with building the maze. As you have seen, the maze consists of a platform and walls fitted onto it. Once you build your own maze with the dimensions suggested by your teacher, you will have to solve the maze – coming up with a step by step procedure you can give to the robot such that it can travel from source to destination. The maze has sixteen cells. The source is at the left bottom cell of the maze and the destination is at the right top of the maze. 

 Planning
As a team, discuss among yourselves how to go about building the maze. You will have to decide what all materials you need. You can get them from your teacher. You may return materials, exchange materials with other teams. Consult with your teacher, if you need any clarification or doubts at this stage. 

 Building
Take the material you use for the platform, say, the cardboard. Using the pencil or sketch pen, draw a layout of the maze on the platform. Share materials with other teams to build your maze. This is team work and it is important that you discuss among your team members and enjoy the spirit of working in a team. Share your thoughts and share your work. Listen to your friends, and help them out.  Be sure to watch how other teams have designed their maze and how different the mazes are, compared to yours. 

 Solving
Now it’s time to start solving the maze. Take down the path in terms of the cell numbers, through which a mouse (a robot) has to travel to the reach the destination from the source. Now, think what made you arrive at your solution. Describe the logic behind your solution. Discuss among your friends and write it down. 

It’s important to think of the solution in terms of numbers.  You can see the whole maze, and think about how to get from the source to the destination.  However, you are much smarter than the robot.  The robot cannot see the destination or understand the whole maze – the robot just knows the number of its current position and the numbers of the neighboring squares it can move to.

This is the real problem, how do you describe the solution to the robot? The robot doesn’t know how to solve the maze. It only knows the source number is 1, and destination number is 16. So you have to give the robot a set of instructions such that the robot reaches the destination. Take down the instructions; consult your teacher for verification. 

When you are doing this, think about how your solution would work if the maze was constructed differently.  It is easy to design a solution if you know the maze beforehand, and simple tell the robot the moves it requires.  However, can you come up with a solution that would work no matter what the pattern of the maze was?  Can you think of ways of testing your solution?

 Evaluation
Use this worksheet to evaluate your team’s results in this lesson. 

1.	Did you succeed in building the maze based on the figure given to you? If not, why? 

2.	Did you succeed in arriving at the solution for the maze? In other words, were you able to give the robot proper ‘instructions’ such that it could reach the destination? If not, why?

3.	Did you negotiate any material trades with other teams? How did that process work for you?

4.	Once you started building the maze, did you decide to change materials or add more materials? 

5.	Do you think that engineers have to stick to their original plan during the building stage? Why?

6.	Do you think that the “building” stage helped you visualize the problem very clearly? If yes, how did it help you in solving the problem?

7.	If you were working alone, would you have been able to complete the project easier? Explain.

8.	Based on this activity, what do you think of algorithm development? Explain.