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They are up there with Scrabble and Monopoly.

Dr Mark Wood’s hands-on puzzles have been the biggest sellers in a couple of Australia’s leading department store toy sections for the past five years and have won numerous awards here and in the US and the UK.

But they are more than just a stimulating way to spend a winter afternoon.

Created by Dr Wood, who has a background in psychology and education, and his research partner Frank Dyksterhuis, a mathematician and physicist, they can open children’s and adults’ minds to logical and deductive thinking, enhance problem-solving strategies and encourage creativity.

“Our puzzles are one of the last bastions against the encroachment of technology,” said Dr Wood, a visitor in the School of Psychology. “I try to create fast brains rather than fast forefingers.”

Dr Wood sees a huge research potential in his puzzles. “They can be used for intelligence testing; they can be used to understand different approaches to problem-solving (Frank and I almost never solve a puzzle the same way); they can be used to look at age-related aspects of thinking.

“You can also make pictures with the puzzles that elicit an ‘ooh’ from people when they see an image of a little child crawling or a baby elephant.

“How does that happen with just 64 pixels, instead of the usual thousands of pixels needed to create a detailed picture? What actually is needed visually to get an idea across to the brain?”

Dr Wood said that some research students at UWA had made use of his puzzles in studying the abilities of children, under the supervision of Professor Mike Anderson in the School of Psychology.

An American by birth, Dr Wood lived in the US until 1964. He immigrated to Sweden, where he did his undergraduate degrees then completed his DPhil in New Zealand. He has lectured in Sweden, New Zealand and at the Universities of New England and Southern Queensland and worked in child welfare and guidance in Queensland.

“I’m an amateur magician and I often play with puzzles and it was while I was working in Queensland that I was fiddlingwith a puzzle, while waiting for a client, that I stumbled into a worm hole in the polyomino universe,” he said. That was 20 years ago.

His first popular puzzle was Kaleidoscope Classic, an 18-piece puzzle that creates a chequerboard and more than 100 other patterns. Frank Dyksterhuis estimates it may have 48 billion solutions.

“That’s the beauty of our puzzles. There are so many ways to solve them. And you can do it on your own or with others,” Dr Wood said.

Kaleidoscope Classic won the London Science Museum’s Inaugural Smart Puzzle of the Year award in 2006 and Australian Puzzle of the year in 2004, as it became one of the country’s best-selling puzzles just months after it was released.

More recently his inventions loKulus and aKumulate won Best Vacation Children’s Puzzle and Game awards in the US this year. Kogworks and Heist won Game and Puzzle of the Year in 2008 from the Australian Games Association, the first time the same company has won both categories.

The puzzles were presented to a workshop at the biennial meeting of the Australian Association of Mathematicians in Perth last month. Teachers have already used them in courses for gifted and talented students, and lauded them as a great tool for developing children’s cognitive functioning and promoting self-esteem.

Dr Wood is keen to hear from academics who are interested in using his puzzles in their research.

By Linda Brophy