Got a cardboard box lid*, some craft sticks, and a glue gun*? Make your own marble maze! Just pencil out where you want your maze walls to go, then lay down a line of glue, attach the wall (e.g. a craft stick turned so it stands on its edge), and so on till you’re done.

I got this idea from Frugal Fun for Boys and Girls. It’s easy as can be. If you don’t have craft sticks, you can use straws, chopsticks, TP tubes, or strips of cardstock or cardboard. If you don’t have (or don’t want to use) a glue gun, you can also use Tacky Glue or just tape things down.

In regular shoe box lids, we did a couple of simple back and forth mazes:

 

Here they are in action:

Then, using a big lid from a box that boots came in, we made a more complex maze, and added Marvel superhero stickers just for the fun of it. You can see that having a BIG box lid makes for a more complex maze! (You could also just a big flat piece of cardboard to build a lid shape from. See below.)

All three of our mazes were sized so a large bouncy ball or shooter marble would fit through them. You could make a much tighter and more complex maze if you used popsicle sticks instead of the jumbo craft sticks and you cut them into shorter lengths and designed it to fit a regular size marble. Your limits on how tight the corners can be are all about how big the ball is that you want to fit through the spaces. So when you lay out your maze, before you glue the sticks down, test each of the tight gaps to be sure your ball can fit through.

Examples

Here are some sample mazes. Some are from my class. The tall “pachinko game” with toilet paper tubes is one I made. The one with the paper arches and wiki stix is from Buggy and Buddy. The one with holes for the ball to fall through is from Jackson District Library. Those with straws: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/76/08/50/7608503f3dae9caebfef6436fff1b1bd.jpg; https://i.pinimg.com/originals/75/54/69/75546955a04e700c85437f0d4af84186.jpg  

Also check out: https://madebyjoel.com/2010/06/cereal-box-marble-run.html and http://madebyjoel.com/2012/08/cereal-box-coin-roller-toy.html

What Kids Learn

This is a great project for having kids test the steps in the engineering process. They draw something out, test it before glueing, glue it, test it again. Sometimes they have to take out a stick they’ve just glued down and try again till the ball can make it through the maze.

Holding the box lid in their hands and tipping it gently back and forth to move the ball through the maze is good for building motor skills and hand-eye coordination. Kids also experience physics as they see that if they tilt the box too far, the ball rolls too fast or spills out. If they don’t tip it enough the ball doesn’t move. We use this project in the week where we study gravity. (Find more hands-on gravity experiments here.)

You can also use it as a magnet maze. Put a paper clip or other metal item in the maze, and use a magnet under the cardboard to drag it through the maze.

* Glue Guns?

You can do this project with tape. Or you can use craft glue (like tacky glue) – but that takes so long to set, and the bond isn’t usually strong enough to keep the sticks up on their side – they may just flop over flat. This project really works best with a glue gun. When I’m working alone, I use a high temp glue gun and it works GREAT – sticks in seconds and stands up to lots of use! If I have children around, I use a low temp glue gun, because hot glue guns can burn! It doesn’t “injure” you in terms of causing any burn that needs treatment, but man oh man does it hurt!

In our class, with parents’ permission and one-on-one adult supervision, we let our 5 and 6 year old students use a low temp glue gun. Teacher Tom believes that even preschoolers can handle glue guns well, and he makes some good arguments for why hot glue guns are such a powerful maker tool for kids, enabling them to do things they simply can’t do with regular glue. You can check out his thoughts at those links.

* Box Lid?

If you don’t happen to have a box lid, it’s easy to turn any flat piece of cardboard into a cardboard square with “walls.”

Just cut a slit in one corner. Fold up the two sides and fold in the triangle shapes at the end, so one is on the inside of the box and the other is on the outside. Tape the corner to create the walls.