Area Mazes

Menseki Meiro, Area Puzzles, Logic Puzzles. Games like Sudoku or Kenken but more demanding, using basic operations and logic. Free Geometry Activities.

Image: area mazes

Area Mazes area the creation of Naoki Inaba, one of the world´s most prolific inventors of logic puzzles.

1. Rules of the Puzzle and method of solution

Mazes are not drawn to scale. Put your ruler away.

All mazes can be solved without using decimals or fractions. This does NOT mean that all box sides and areas must be whole numbers.

Through the clues that provide the lengths and areas that are already available, look for the figure that should go in ?

The area of a rectangle can be calculated using the formula: vertical length x horizontal length

First let's look at the whole figure, and then find the figures that we can calculate using the lengths and areas that we already know. As we complete the figure with the lengths and areas we have found, it will be a great help to think about what the next figure we want to find.

These games are ideal for homework. They are a fun alternative to regular homework and parents can help their children along. It is very popular with children and parents and they were featured in an article in The Guardian by Alex Bellos on August 3rd, 2015 and in the NY Times on August 17th, 2015. From the NY Time article:

Solving a mathematics problem, people usually focus on what the answer is. As for this puzzle, the integer-only restriction makes it fun to follow the path to the answer, as if you were navigating a maze.

Download a sample of these kind of puzzles in PDF [PDF Document] from here.