A-maze for kids

A-maze can be used with children. We’ve used it with 8–12 year olds in kid-maze-passages, run on Children Helping Science. Compared with a standard adult setup, three things help.

A restricted distractor list. Children will see every distractor, so the word list matters more. The current distractor generator’s default list (curated_word_list.txt) excludes offensive words, and (to a lesser extent) words about violence and other sensitive topics. Words can also be added to exclude.txt. Even so, review the distractors before running a study with children.

A gentler introduction. The task isn’t natural, so kids need to understand it before the real items start. The kid version has:

• a picture of where to put their fingers;
• three practice sentences that fade out the help. The first gives a tip for every word and shows the sentence building up; the second only shows the sentence building up; the third has no help;
• key badges (E and I) under the words;
• reassuring feedback after mistakes (“Oops! Wait a moment…” then “Try again!”).

Fun colors and structure. A light background, a rainbow-bordered card, big buttons, and pictures between sentences. There’s also a progress bar across the top, with pause and stop buttons.

Try it

The kid-friendly demo is the kid-maze-passages experiment without the consent pages: the introduction, practice, and two short passages (dinosaurs and whales).

The code is in jspsych-maze: source/src/kid-maze-experiment.js and source/src/kid/ for the timeline, and source/styles/kid.scss for the look. It’s a good starting point for a kids’ study. The styling only applies under a kid-maze class on the page, so it can be reused without affecting anything else.