Vigor Maze

Taiwan has this weird policy where if a (single) public holiday falls on a Tuesday or a Thursday, they will give you off the adjacent Monday or Friday as well, thus creating a four-day holiday. The problem is that nothing comes for free. Instead of just having an extra day off, or losing a day’s pay, the average worker has to “make up” the day on a Saturday, generally a week or two before the public holiday. While I can recognize that some people enjoy taking large trips during the public holidays, almost everyone I know personally find it to be a nightmare, due to population density and huge amounts of crowds.

On one such Saturday I had my class design up a Pac-Man style game. The kids cut out blocks and items and pasted them onto paper; afterwards, we entered everything into NES Maker to bring the game to life.

For a variety of reasons that I won’t post online, I was unable to share this game online until now. Some level designs are quite good, whereas others are…humorous; however, as an educator I believe that we shouldn’t stifle the creativeness of children, so I left each student do as he or she desired, as long as the designs fit into the parameters I had provided (don’t have the enemies next to the player upon start, etc).

You can read more about the game here:

Edutainment Maze Game (substack.com)