The Maze Runner

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. Have you ever completed a maze on paper? Have you ever walked through a maze? If not, can you imagine what it would be like? How can mazes affect people?

Teaching Suggestion: If possible, asking students to complete a maze on paper could be a powerful visual introduction to keep in mind as they read. The videos below offer images from mazes people can walk through, which can help students visualize the Maze Thomas encounters. You might have a discussion putting the maze in Spain in perspective; it takes about an hour to get to the center of that maze, but Thomas runs for hours before getting through one section of the Maze in the novel.

• “Amazing Maze: What Science Says About Solving Labyrinths” by National Geographic includes an article interviewing a neuroscientist and a 3-minute video about mazes, ways to solve them, and ways they appear in our everyday lives.
• This BBC article provides a 1-minute video and details about Spain’s largest garden maze.