More Tessellating Mazes

More Tessellating Mazes, a sequel to Tantalizing Tessellating Mazes, is now available on amazon.com.

It has the same format as Tantalizing Tessellating Mazes, with a selection of 70 mazes all built using tessellations, with solutions at the end. The tessellations include a variety of shapes that resemble real-world objects such as geese,

 insects,

 stylized birds

 and many more living things. There are also mazes built on patterns of inanimate objects such as planes

 and clothespins.

 I could not resist the temptation to include a few mazes built on tessellations that that are non-representational but are visually intriguing.

The mazes in both More Tessellating Mazes and Tantalizing Tessellating Mazes are fairly easy and intended for pre-teenage children. (The samples shown above are not mazes from the book--they merely illustrate a few of the tessellations patterns used in the book.)

A book of train mazes

Casey Loves Trains (And Likes Mazes) is now available at Amazon.com.

This book is the result of a request from my daughter, who has a son who loves trains, to do a maze book about trains. My initial reaction was that I could not do such a book. Trains are one dimensional while mazes are two dimensional. After a bit of thought, I figured out how to manage the project.

There are some mazes that are clearly train related. In the maze below, you have to stay on cars with hearts.

 Rails can be used to form mazes in several ways.

 Obey the semaphores in this maze.

 There are several ways to make mazes of tracks, and also of ties and spikes.

 But if you want a book that is more than a few pages long, and Casey Loves Trains is over 100 pages, you have to find ways to bring other sorts of things into the story line. Like elephants.

 Or horses.

 Or cows.

(I like tessellations.)

 And dinosaurs.

How did all these things get into a book about trains? The mazes illustrate the story of a trip that a young boy takes on a train. While he is on the train, he sees and does many things.

It is a book designed to appeal to young people who love trains (as well as dinosaurs) and who like mazes.

Maze Cornucopia

A Cornucopia of Mazes: Stars, Tilings and Patterns was published earlier this month.

From the introduction:

In January and February of 2012 I designed Tantalizing Tessellating Mazes, a book with 70 mazes. Intended to appeal to children in elementary school, the mazes had to be fairly simple. As I worked on the book, I kept thinking that a similar book, focused on interesting geometric shapes and patterns but designed for an adult audience, would be a fun project. A Cornucopia of Mazes: Stars, Tilings and Patterns is that book, though there is little overlap with the designs used in Tantalizing Tessellating Mazes.

A Cornucopia of Mazes: Stars, Tilings and Patterns has 84 mazes in three sections. The first section features two dozen mazes based on star patterns. Only one of them uses the familiar five-pointed star or pentagram. Stars with three, four, six, and eight points are easier to fit into simple and regular patterns and thus make better building blocks for mazes.

It is available from Amazon for $6.95.

They are out

For the past three months I have been having an adventure in designing and publishing three books. (Notice that I did not say writing.) It was the prospect of doing books like these that led to the creation of this blog long ago. The end result is now visible on Amazon.com. 

Easy Alphabet Mazes has trivially easy mazes because it is meant for preschool children and Kindergarten tots. It is 108 pages long (as are the other two books) but has no words for 105 of those pages. My granddaughter helped me a great deal by solving the 105 mazes in the book so I could see the thought processes of a very young child.

Tantalizing Tessellating Mazes is aimed at kids a bit older, perhaps from second to sixth grades. The mazes are fairly easy, but not trivially easy as in Easy Alphabet Mazes. All 70 mazes are built using tessellation patterns. What, you ask, is a tessellation pattern? It is a shape that fits together exactly to fill the plane. Here is an example of one that is purely geometric:

One of the fun things about tessellation shapes is that some of them resemble or suggest people, animals, or other items that we see or use. For example, what does this tessellation pattern suggest?

Here is one more tessellation pattern, one that was not used in Tantalizing Tessellating Mazes. Rather it was used in the third of the books, Amusing Alphabet Mazes.

Amusing Alphabet Mazes has the most difficult puzzles of the three and is aimed at an audience of older children and adults. It has 80 mazes.

Elsewhere I have some web pages to support these three books, and there you can read about how I make mazes, the series of occurrences that led me to making mazes, my recollections of working with Dover Publishing on two maze books over 15 years ago, and why I think what Create Space is doing has the potential to revolutionize book publishing.

In addition to being available for Amazon, these books are also available directly from Create Space, (which is a division of Amazon): Easy Alphabet Mazes, Tantalizing Tessellating Mazes, and Amusing Alphabet Mazes. The cost of each is $6.95 plus shipping at either Amazon or Create Space, but if you order from Create Space and use discount code QW8A7UDR the price will be reduced by $3.00 (on each book, or each book will be only $3.95). This code only works on Create Space, not on Amazon, and to order on Create Space you must create an account just as you must create an account on Amazon. For some people Amazon will be a better choice because the books qualify for their four-for-three program, where if you buy four qualifying items, you get the cheapest free, and also their program that gives you free shipping on orders over $25.00.

PS: The way that items appear on Amazon is odd. The listing does not appear all at once, fully formed. Rather it appears piece by piece. Each day it may add a bit. If these listing ever get the "Look-Inside" feature, I will know that they are complete.

PPS: If any of you get any of the books, I would really like to hear your reactions, good or bad. Leave them in the comments.

In the beginning

I have been working for the past six weeks on several maze books. One of them is aimed at the Kindergarten/pre-school set, and although I have tried to make the mazes simple, I have come to realize that they are not an appropriate introduction to mazes. Before the young child encounters my books of mazes, he or she should have done even easier mazes.

I do not want to construct a set of such mazes as a printed book--there are some already there and it is not worth a great deal of time. I have decided instead to construct an electronic book, in pdf format, of twenty to thirty very easy mazes, mazes that a three-year-old child should find doable. Here are three of the mazes from the beginning of the collection:

  (Can anyone get lost in that?)

(The path is shorter, but there are now deadends.)

The mazes do get a little bit harder as the book goes along--there are only a few really simple mazes that are possible. I am not quite finished with the document. When I am finished, I will give a link so anyone can download it.

Update: I never did finish this project. Sorry. However, I have finished a lot of mazes books that you can find and purchase on Amazon.com. For links, go here.

It is all about the future

Some time in the future I will begin to post some mazes here. For now, visit http://ingrimayne.com/mazes/mazeindex.htm