How to Make a Cardboard Box Maze

Cardboard box mazes can be used for science experiments involving mice and cheese, or just for fun, like trying to navigate a marble through a friend's maze. These mazes can easily be made with a few supplies that you can likely find around your house, and are a great activity to do with the kids. You can also make a larger maze with larger boxes that can be crawled through for fun with the kids.

Small Maze

Set your cardboard box so that the open top is facing up, as if you were going to pack it with something.

Draw the solution path for your maze on the bottom of your box with your pencil.

Draw misleading paths now on the bottom of your box, around the solution path so the solution isn't too easy to find.

Measure the lines that you have drawn with a ruler so you will know what you need to cut from your cardboard sheet.

Cut walls for all the lines that you have drawn on the bottom of your box from your cardboard sheet.

Hot glue the maze walls in place.

Crawl Through Maze

Gather several appliance boxes, the more boxes the larger the maze. Boxes from refrigerators, washers, dryers, or dishwashers would all work.

Decide on a solution path and tape boxes together to create this solution path. The boxes at either end of the solution path should be open so that the start and the end of the maze is clear.

Cut openings along the solution path to attach more pathways to with your duct tape. These pathways can wind around back into the solution path or they can lead to a dead end--a closed box.

Connect some of the pathways by cutting holes into some of the pathways boxes and duct tapes them together.


The more complicated the solution path is the harder your maze will be to solve, so if you want a really hard maze, make the solution path take a lot of twists and turns.

For the crawl through maze, put the appliance boxes on their sides, so that they are longer rather than taller will make it so that you don't have to use so many boxes.

Try local hardware and electronics stores for appliance boxes that they may have left from their floor models.

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