I once listened to talk by Harry Kroto (one of the guys who won a Nobel prize for buckminsterfullerene) and one of things that concerned him was how the new generations of kids are going to get into science and engineering. Nowadays you can’t take apart any device you buy these days because of fancy tamper-proof screws and even if you manage to get inside, it’s all condensed into some epoxy covered microchip, leaving you only with “It just does” as the answer to “How does X device work?”.
I guess the modern answer is “look it up on Wikipedia”.
