A free, kid-safe auto-generating maze pad for tiny explorers — 100 levels of incremental adventure starting from age 2½, with self-explaining hints, dotted trails, and a friendly animated character. Installable as an app.
🔗 Live: https://skgandikota.github.io/mazepad/
MazePad is built for my kid (and yours): a one-page, no-login, no-ads tool that gradually trains spatial reasoning. Every level is freshly generated; difficulty rises only ~0.1% per level across 100 levels, so a 2½-year-old can start and never hit a wall they can't climb.
- 100 auto-generated levels — every maze is procedurally generated; the algorithm raises difficulty by ~0.1% per step from a 3×3 toddler maze to a 20×20 challenge
- Self-starting — every hint a child needs is on-screen: animated arrow at start, glowing goal, dotted suggested trail that fades as the level gets harder
- Dotted-line tracing — kids drag the character along a soft dotted path instead of clunky thick lines
- Animated walking character — a friendly chalk-style critter that walks/crawls as the finger or pen drags
- Auto-advance — solve a maze and the next one auto-loads with confetti, no menus
- Pen, finger, keyboard, or arrow buttons — works on tablet, laptop, phone
- No fails, no penalties — getting stuck just shows a fresh hint; nobody loses
- Installable PWA — fullscreen kiosk, offline-capable (service worker), screen wake-lock keeps the tablet awake
- Kid-safe — no login, no ads, no tracking beyond optional anonymous Google Analytics; settings hidden behind a long-press parental lock
- Open https://skgandikota.github.io/mazepad/ on a tablet, laptop, or phone.
- The first level loads itself with an arrow showing where to start — drag from the character to the star.
- Each solved maze auto-loads the next, slightly trickier one (~0.1% harder).
- Long-press the ⚙ gear (3 s) to jump to a level, reset progress, or toggle hints.
- Long-press the 📲 install row to add MazePad to your home screen — it then launches fullscreen.
For a true kid-locked experience use your OS lock:
- Android: Settings → Security → Screen Pinning
- iOS / iPadOS: Settings → Accessibility → Guided Access
- Single-page vanilla JS — no build step, no framework, no tracking beyond optional Google Analytics
- Tailwind CSS via CDN, Inter font via Google Fonts
- HTML5 Canvas + Pointer Events for the slate and animation
- Procedural maze generation: recursive backtracker with seeded RNG so every level is reproducible
- Web App Manifest + Service Worker (cache-first app shell)
- LocalStorage for progress (which level you're on)
- schema.org JSON-LD for proper authorship attribution
Made with ❤️ by Saikoushik Gandikota for my kid — and yours.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saikoushikg/
- GitHub: @skgandikota
- Sister site: TracingPad
MIT — fork it, remix it, gift it to your kid's school.