M&C maybe you could post the handout for the power settings etc they gave you? Give the unsuspecting a little more than a day or so to memorize/practice.
With the cubes I used a bit of patter recognition (ie the point of the isosceles triangle (on one face) points to (depiction on other face) and try to recognise those easy ones first then work from there. Mind you this was a looong time ago. Good luck!