Listen to this episode of More or Less, featuring a charming tribute to Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons. It makes my point exactly about the benefits of stealth teaching.

A generation of young male nerds constructed elaborate fantasy worlds and flights of imagination while getting intimately acquainted with probability and basic statistics to a degree that grade 8 teachers can only dream. It really is unfortunate that the popularity of DnD was focused on a particular subset of the child population.

This raises an important question for the designers of future teaching games: Was the limited popularity of DnD because of the subject matter (Orcs and Elves) or because of the degree to which the math was near the surface of the play? Could you recreate the success for other groups of kids by changing the packaging, or would you need to make the math teaching even MORE stealthy?