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The last thing I would ever admit is that puzzles are educational. Yes, yes, there are a great many people running around saying that puzzle-solving is a fine way to keep your faculties sharp. There are suddenly any number of “brain training” products and Web sites out there. Old age homes teem with residents solving sudoku and crosswords.

But, jeez, keep all that beneficial stuff on a low volume, would you? I’m working over here, trying to get kids to solve puzzles. I don’t want them equating puzzle-solving with broccoli.

These days I’m puzzling kids mostly through my two books: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen and its brand-new sequel, The Potato Chip Puzzles. (May I mention that they’ve been compared to the Encyclopedia Brown books and also that great puzzle mystery, The Westing Game? Thanks. I’m done plugging now.) I also go to schools and libraries to puzzle the kids face-to-face.

But there is no reason you can’t puzzle your kids yourself, even if you’ve never created a puzzle in your life. Let me show you how.

The next time your child has a birthday, don’t just hand over the present. Make your kid work for it! Create a puzzle hunt that runs through your house, with the present as the treasure waiting at the end.

Here’s how it works: You’ll hand the birthday boy or girl the first puzzle. The answer to that will be a location, which is where the second puzzle can be found. The answer to that will send your child to the third puzzle, and so on, until finally the presents are discovered.

Probably your hunt should be no more than three or four puzzles. You need, then, three or four different ways of coding a simple message like LOOK UNDER YOUR BED. Okay, then. Here we go:

1) Come up with a message where the number of letters is divisible by three or four, ignoring spaces and punctuation. As it happens, LOOK UNDER YOUR BED works great—it’s exactly sixteen letters. Write this out in a grid, like so:

Now cut this up into columns, and scramble the pieces. Hand them to your child.

It’ll be up to your little birthday-present-seeker to put the columns back into their correct order, and thus discover the next place he or she must go. To make it a little easier, you might want to indicate which letters are the ends of the words, by putting a small black stripe on the rightmost edge of that square. Also, don’t make your kids figure out how this puzzle works. Tell ‘em what they need to do. (Of course, if they’ve read The Puzzling World of Winston Breen, they’ll know what to do, because Winston faces a puzzle quite a bit like this one. Did I mention that book is freshly out in paperback?)

2) Your next puzzle can use a telephone code. This is a good puzzle for multiple kids to solve together as a team, and it’s a simple puzzle to create: Just turn each letter of your message into the number it represents on a telephone keypad. So PENGUIN BOOKS would be encoded as 7364846 26657. Keep the words fairly short for this one. And again, I suggest you tell your treasure hunters what they need to do to solve this puzzle—don’t make them figure out they need to use a telephone keypad. That would be really tricky.

3) Next, use a great code for kids: A Pigpen Code. Here are a couple of Web sites to teach you how to write in Pigpen: http://www.scouting.org.za/codes/pigpen.php and http://secretcodebreaker.com/pigpen.html. You’ll see that these two sites go about things in slightly different ways. Choose whichever version you prefer, and remember to provide your child with the key.

4) Finally, you can use a Trace-a-Quote puzzle. This one couldn’t be easier to create: Just write out a message in a grid, starting in one corner and putting one letter in each box, following a weaving path that goes up, down, left, and right until it reaches the opposite corner. Ignore spacing and punctuation in your message—just write in the letters. Ideally, every box in your grid will have a letter in it when you’re done. (Here’s an example from Winston Breen’s own blog: http://winstonbreen.com/blog/?p=168.) Give your puzzle solver the starting location, as well as the number of words in the answer, and the number of letters in each word.

So, boom! In no time at all you can create a simple puzzle hunt that will challenge your child for an hour—and the present at the end will be appreciated that much more. Of course, if your child is anything like I was as a kid, a treasure hunt is a magnificent present all by itself.

Eric Berlin, The Potato Chip Puzzles, YR mystery, Penguin Books