So to facilitate the training of camp attendees (and design engineers) next summer, I purchased many different puzzleboxes in Hakone to use as teaching tools.
That process requires a very different kind of thought process and one which I developed as a child when I discovered puzzleboxes in Chinatown in San Francisco.
The puzzleboxes are excellent tools for teaching these same skills to design engineers and are equally successful in captivating the minds of kids in real-world problem solving with a tangible reward for success.
The same fundamentals apply in opening puzzleboxes from Hakone, Japan: something appears impossible to circumvent until you figure out the secret, and locks, just like the secret boxes, are all about hidden secrets.
If you have a kid that is intrigued by puzzles and you want to teach him real-world skills in thinking logically while having fun at the same time, you might want to consider buying him or her one or more puzzleboxes as a gift.