maze Archives | Treinen Farm

2015 Maze

Getting ready for fall

The Treinen household is always a little crazy at this time of the year. Like any family with kids, there’s the back-to-school conversations (what do you need for school supplies, what teachers do you have, do you really need new soccer cleats and when will you stop growing…) and the end-of-summer conversations (can we fit in one more visit to Grandma and Grandpa, when are you going to start going to bed at a reasonable hour…)

Here at the farm, we also have the many, many conversations about how preparations for fall are coming (which employees are coming back, do we have corn for the corn pit, what prizes will we have for the secret locations…)

This is how this usually goes: “No, the dirt should go over there!”

But the thing we all look forward to every year is the Big Question: What are we going to add for 2015 that will be fun? Fun for kids, fun for adults. We go to conventions to look for ideas (yes, there is such a thing as a Corn Maze Convention!); we talk to other people with agritainment farms; we go to amusement parks and zoos and museums and pay attention to what works and what doesn’t.

No spoilers yet–we’re in the process of creating an amazing fall 2015 experience. I’ll post more photos as the project moves along–stay tuned.

There are packages of fun arriving every day

Naughty dog stealing fun from the packages

August 23, 2015/by Treinen Farm

2014 Corn Maze, Athena, Math in the maze, Maze Design, owls

Treinen Farm Maze Design 2014 The Owl of Athena

Preliminary drone photo of the 2014 Athena’s Owl Maze.

Designing the corn maze is a challenge every year. I’ve gotten better at handling the actual, physical design using Adobe Illustrator (not the easiest program to teach yourself, BTW…) but the theme is always tricky.

Here are some of the parameters I always set for the design:

Aesthetically pleasing and interesting
The central figure must be easily recognizable
Must make a good maze (no long dead-ends; multiple ways to get through the maze; trails fill up the 1 acre field more or less equally throughout the entire field)
Math concepts incorporated into design
History/literature/other connections to design

New parameter for 2014: must be awesome enough for outdoor advertising–last year our Kraken maze made incredible billboards, so this year I wanted to also make something that could looking amazing and maybe a little scary for the outdoor people to work with. That’s why the owl turned out so creepy…

I’ll post more on the math and mythology connections in the maze, but the basic ideas involve geometry (most prominently the Platonic solids) and the Greek mythology stories of Athena.

August 4, 2014/by Treinen Farm

2013 Corn Maze

2013 Treinen Farm Sea Monster Corn Maze is complete

The Kraken has emerged from the corn field! (Drone photo courtesy of DMZ Aerial http://www.dmzaerial.com/)

The maze has been cut into the field and all the paths have been tilled. Now, we’ll check the photos against the design for accuracy, and adjust either the corn field or the map as necessary. And the corn needs to grow about another five feet or so–it’s 3-4 feet tall right now, but at this stage it can grow 4-6 inches a day if it’s hot.

This is the first time we’ve had a drone take the preliminary photos, and we are super impressed–both with how well the photos turned out, and about how much fun it was to have the drone flying around. Mitchell Fiene with DMZ Aerial (http://www.dmzaerial.com/) stopped by with our nephew (who is in the ag industry) and we got a look at the future of crop scouting.

OK, drones are the future of a lot of things, but they are very big in the agriculture industry right now–it’s incredible to be able to look for crop damage from the air. Mitchell even said he was hoping to be able to swoop down and look for pest species of insects–the drones can take great photos from above, as in our maze photo, but also have the capability to fly very low with the high resolution camera. I suggested he come back in a couple of weeks and we’d probably have some cucumber beetles in our pumpkin patch (he was thrilled.)

July 13, 2013/by Treinen Farm

2013 Corn Maze, Maze Design

The Making of a Maze Summer Camp

I think that the thing that Alan and I love most about our corn maze is the process of creation–all of it, from brainstorming and sketching, to actual design, and then to the task of carving it into the corn field. This year, we’ve partnered with the Center for Engagement in Madison WI , to turn our incredibly fun but private process into something that can be actually experienced by young people: the very first “Maze Mania” summer camp.

The camp will consist of twelve kids and three teachers, and their task will be to work with Alan and I as they learn the maze design and cutting process. And it’s not easy work: they’ll be challenged to come up with a design (for the Children’s Maze) that meets very specific parameters, and part of the camp is spent actually cutting the maze into the cornfield on a (probably) hot summer day.

For me, the camp is about sharing the joyfulness of math and design art and seeing a project through from the beginning to completion. I spend a good week designing the big maze, and Alan spends another week cutting it, so in early summer we just living and breathing the maze 24/7. It’s pretty intense, but fun. It’s not often that a real-world business has a process like this that is both interesting and accessible to young people, so we are eager to share the experience.

May 23, 2013/by Treinen Farm

2012 Corn Maze, Math in the maze

Math Day at the Maze

This week is our first Math Day at the Maze. We’ve got almost 450 kids ready to learn about how we make the maze and the math concepts we’ve incorporated. We will also have hands-on stations, presented by the Wisconsin Mathematics Council. Dave Ebert, the president, has put together a team of math students who will run stations for the younger students. We’re pretty excited–it will be a lot of fun. It’s a lot of kids (we did have to turn some away) but we’ve got lots of activities to keep everyone busy.

How we cut the carbon nanotube in the maze

Carbon nanotube design for the corn maze–we’ll show the kids the symmetry in this figure, and we’ll demonstrate how we cut it!

October 4, 2012/by Treinen Farm

2012 Corn Maze, GRIN Technology, Steampunk

The Meaning in the Maze

We always like to include multiple layers of meaning within our corn maze. We like to have an aesthetically pleasing image that is fairly easily recognizable (this year it’s da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” aka “that guy, you know, the one in the circle with this arms out like this <insert realistic demo of arms outstretched here>, yeah, that guy”. However, our da Vinci guy is a cyborg–note the ray gun hand and the mechanical wing, not to mention the assorted gears for joints and a clockwork heart.

Cyborg guy is shown not in a circle/square deal like da Vinci’s, but in the planar projection of a hypercube (aka a “tesseract”, aka “what are you talking about?”) So, a hypercube is like this: you know what a square is, right? Okay, now a cube is just a three-dimensional square. Still with me? A hypercube is simply a four-dimensional cube. ( Here’s a little more technical explanation.) Very cool.

The gears are a nod to mechanical technology, especially the steam-era –aka Steampunk, which is also cool. We’ve got a little circuit-boardy stuff filling in the spaces on the lower right and mid-left.

The knot-like thing in the lower left is, well, a knot, because knots are mathematically interesting. It’s made out of a carbon nanotube, which leads us into the fascinating world of nanotechnology.

The theme this year is technology, ranging from the awesomeness of da Vinci to the steam-era, all the way to modern math and tech. Specifically the “GRIN” technologies: genetics (umm, because the cyborg is also genetically-modified–yeah, that’s it…); robotics (again, cyborg guy sort of counts); information tech (circuit boards); and nanotech, as previously noted (plus the weaponized nanoswarms employed in patrolling the maze for people cutting through the corn…)

More info and links to come on all of these elements.

August 23, 2012/by Treinen Farm

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