Printable maze · Themes
Kindness maze
A maze carved into the shape of a heart, at three sizes. Exactly one route runs from start to finish, so there is always an answer and never a shortcut.
Print the page above, or take the easy grid as a PDF. Both carry the answer key, and large print is a setting rather than a separate file.
Show the answer key
Print the page above, or take the medium grid as a PDF. Both carry the answer key, and large print is a setting rather than a separate file.
Show the answer key
Print the page above, or take the hard grid as a PDF. Both carry the answer key, and large print is a setting rather than a separate file.
Show the answer key
About Kindness
Kindness is the practice of treating others with care you are not required to give: holding a door, sharing lunch, saying something true and generous when nothing forces you to. Schools often set aside time for it, and World Kindness Day falls on November 13 each year, marked in many countries with service projects and classroom activities. Researchers who study helping behavior have found that acting kindly tends to lift the mood of the giver as well as the receiver, which is part of why the habit spreads.
Why a heart
The silhouette is a heart, the symmetrical two-lobed shape that has stood for affection in European art since the Middle Ages and now appears on everything from valentines to text messages. Its rounded lobes and pointed base give the corridors a natural pinch at the bottom and a fork at the top, so the outline itself decides where paths must split and where they must narrow.
Teachers building a kindness maze into a character education lesson, and parents filling a quiet afternoon in the week before Valentine's Day, tend to reach for this one.
What is in this maze
A 10 by 10 maze cut into the shape of a heart, with a single route of 42 steps and 28 turns from start to finish.
| Size | Grid | Shortest route | Turns |
|---|---|---|---|
| easy | 10 x 10 | 42 steps | 28 |
| medium | 16 x 16 | 79 steps | 51 |
| hard | 24 x 24 | 216 steps | 133 |
How to solve a Kindness maze
Every maze here is perfect, which is a precise thing rather than a compliment: there are no loops and no islands, so exactly one route joins any two points. That has a useful consequence. Keep one hand on the wall and never take it off, and you will walk the whole maze and arrive at the exit. It always works on a perfect maze. It is also slow, because it walks you into every dead end on the way.
Filling dead ends is faster. Find any square with walls on three sides, shade it in, and treat it as solid. That usually creates a new dead end next to it, so keep going. When you run out, what is left unshaded is the route. On the easy grid that is a few minutes of work; on the hard one it is the whole puzzle, and it is how most people who solve mazes quickly actually do it.
Working backwards is the third trick, and it exploits how a maze is built. Passages branch far more often near the start than near the finish, so tracing from the exit means fewer wrong turns to reject. On a shaped maze the outline helps too: the heart silhouette is solid wall, so a corridor running along the edge of the shape has nowhere to branch and can be followed at speed.