Maze Game

What is Maze Game?

This activity allows the user to practice their point plotting skills by having them move a robot through a mine field to a target location. Moves are accomplished by specifying the coordinates of the new location. In order to win, the path must not cross a mine.

The coordinate plane system was developed by a sick mathematician. As Rene Descarte lay in bed sick, he saw a fly buzzing around on the ceiling. His ceiling was made of square tiles. As he watched, he realized that he could describe the position of the fly by the ceiling tile he was on. After this experience, he developed the Cartesian coordinate system in the 17th century to help visualize functions via plotting function values as ordered pairs. In this system a grid of evenly spaced horizontal and vertical lines is drawn, a center or "origin" is chosen, and horizontal and vertical scales are chosen. Here's an example:

Notice that the blue point is labeled with its Cartesian coordinates, the horizontal and vertical movement from the origin, in that order. This is the mathematical convention for naming points.

Another name for the horizontal movement value is the abscissa, and the vertical movement is the ordinate. These terms are more rare now than they used to be, but you might still hear them being used.

Related Resources

• Activity Function Flyer
• Activity General Coordinates Game
• Activity Graph Sketcher
• Activity Graphit
• Activity Ordered Simple Plot
• Activity Simple Coordinates Game
• Activity Simple Maze Game
• Activity Simple Plot
• Discussion about From Graphs to Function Machines and Back
• Discussion about Introduction to the Coordinate Plane and Coordinates
• Worksheet Four Quadrant Grid, 14x18
• Worksheet Four Quadrant Grid, 28x36
• Worksheet Maze Game Suggestions
• Worksheet Maze Game Suggestions (doc)

How Do I Use This Activity?

This activity allows the user to practice their point plotting skills by having them move a robot through a mine field to a target location.

Controls and Output

• Determine the X and Y coordinates at the end point of the robot's next step. For example, we want the robot to go to the point highlighted by a yellow dot. The X coordinate of the point is -6, and the Y coordinate of the point is -7:
• To command the robot to make the next step, type the X coordinate in the X=[___] space, and the Y coordinate in the Y=[___] space:
• When coordinates for the next step are prepared, click on the GO button to make the robot move. The movements of the robot are traced in blue as long as the robot does not come in contact with any mines.
• If the robot comes in contact with a mine along his journey, the movements of the robot are then traced in red.

• To start a new game, choose the Number of Mines you want on the board: and click on the New Game button:

  

• The user may control whether the robot starting and target positions are fixed or variable using the following control:

  If this control is set to No, the robot's starting position is always (-10, -10) and the robot's target position is always (10, 10). If this control is set to Yes, the robot's starting and target position are placed at random positions on the screen as shown below:

  

Scoring

• This activity will automatically record how successful you are at answering the questions. To view the score, press the Show Score button at the bottom of the activity and a pop-up window will appear with the scoreboard.
• To close this pop-up window press the Close button or click back on the main window.
• To pause the scoring, press the Active button at the bottom of the screen and it will change to a Paused button. To resume scoring, press the Paused button.
• To reset the scoreboard, open the scoreboard using the Show Score button and then press the Reset button.

Because this activity randomly generates questions, a feature called Seed Random has been implemented that allows multiple users using different computers to work on the same problem. See Seed Random Help for instructions on using this feature.

Description

This activity allows the user to practice their point plotting skills by having them move a robot through a mine field to a target location. Moves are accomplished by specifying the coordinates of the new location. In order to win, the path must not cross a mine. This activity would work well in groups of two for about thirty minutes if you use the exploration questions and fifteen minutes otherwise.

Place in Mathematics Curriculum

This activity can be used to:

• introduce the Cartesian coordinate system
• practice students' point plotting skills
• practice students' graph reading skills
• motivate the concept of slope

Be Prepared to

• answer the question "How do you find distance?"
• discuss distance, positive and negative coordinates, quadrants, etc

Related Resources

• Activity Function Flyer
• Activity General Coordinates Game
• Activity Graph Sketcher
• Activity Graphit
• Activity Ordered Simple Plot
• Activity Simple Coordinates Game
• Activity Simple Maze Game
• Activity Simple Plot
• Discussion about From Graphs to Function Machines and Back
• Discussion about Introduction to the Coordinate Plane and Coordinates
• Lesson on Cartesian Coordinate System
• Lesson on Graphs and Functions
• Worksheet Four Quadrant Grid, 14x18
• Worksheet Four Quadrant Grid, 28x36
• Worksheet Maze Game Suggestions
• Worksheet Maze Game Suggestions (doc)