ELEN1004: ENGINEERING DESIGN AND SKILLS
PROJECT 1: MAZE NAVIGATION (LEARNING HOW TO SOLVE PROBLEMS)
A TECHNICAL REPORT BY:
MUSA TIMOTHY MUKANSI
(STUDENT NO. 1393636)
ABSTRACT:
This technical report defines a maze, its varying forms, its part in improving learning methods, and identifies many traditional methods to solving mazes.
1.1 INTRODUCTION – WHAT IS A MAZE?
The English dictionary describes a maze as a highly-complicated inter-communication of passages, i.e. a labyrinth. The dictionary also goes further to define a maze as any non-simple network that causes both confusion and bewilderment.
1.2 EXAMPLES OF MAZES
Mazes are all around us, for example, a textbook can be a maze. You have to page your way through the vast sea of raw knowledge that the book offers in order to find information that is relevant to you in that moment in time. Your city or town is also a maze since you have to navigate through the undulating, exhausting streets (that at times even feel tedious) just to find that one address that could be your home, your school or a perfectly generic shop. The same applies for your school, your local library and even your own home! If you were immersed into any of these places for the first time, you would have a very tough time finding your way through them and you would even, eventually, become very frustrated by these mazes.
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One of the world’s most famous garden mazes in the world are the Dole Plantation in Oahu, Hawaii (which is allegedly the longest garden maze in the world) , the Reignac-sur-Indre in France and the Cherry Crest Adventure Farm in America . All these garden mazes offer the perfect contemporary definition of what a maze is and we can take them as a metaphor for the mazes we must navigate through in our