Me personally, I am sick of building Duplo towers! It's OK for say 20 minutes a day but after that 20 minute mark I am looking to escape. I mean there has to be more to Duplo than just building towers right? That's when I remembered watching this clip on YouTube where someone had built a Lego maze for their hamster to run through. Now we might not have a hamster but we do have marbles! And so our Duplo marble maze was born.
Here are the instructions for how to build one yourself.
What you will need
- Large Duplo board
- Duplo bricks of various sizes
- one marble
- Eager adult and child ready to build!
You can make it easy for young children by setting up a single path towards the finish. This is the easiest version we were able to come up with. Start is at top right hand corner and finish is the bottom left hand corner.
To make it harder you can create nooks like in a real maze that trick you or block the marble from reaching its goal. These are just small nooks and don't take much moving of the board to get out of. The path itself is also pretty easy because it starts with needing to slant to the left, then across towards the top of the photo and then to the right, back towards the end again. See photo below.
This is what I like to think is the hardest maze I've made yet! See photo below.
Well I thought it was a really hard maze but it only took 2 struggling turns before the little one mastered it. Unfortunately I didn't get those first two attempt on video but here's a few photos of her playing with one of the mazes I made.
What I as a parent love about this game is that it is easy to increase the complexity of the game. Also it's easy to create a new maze, a few blocks moved and bingo! I also think it's a game that can entertain children of varying ages. I can imagine young toddlers or babies getting a big kick out of watching the marble move around, even if an adult has to do it for them and of course you could build this with Lego too, challenging older children by designing more complex mazes.It also gets you thinking creatively and challenging yourself to make harder mazes sure beats building those one brick towers!
If you give this idea a go please let me know how you went and send a photo of your hardest maze design. I'd love to share them and set up a bit of a slide show on this blog.
Thanks for reading and as always happy playing!
Fantastic alternative way to use duplo. Just need to buy Hamish a big flat board to build it on. Will start searching the op shops :)
ReplyDeleteExcellent, you sure no one's got one to give to you for free? Maybe a birthday wish?
ReplyDelete