Quests also gave students’ RPG avatars new skills, abilities and character stats. Nix limited his game’s stats to Attack and Defense but says he’s learned of other teachers who have taken the concept further by including additional stats like Charisma, Strength and Intelligence.

Though enjoying the game was the defining characteristic of the class, students still learned the material. In his blog, Nix wrote he was “the leader of a group of data-gathering soldiers bound and determined to gather and collect information about different civilizations throughout history.”

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The doors make me think of "Deal or no Deal". I loved that game show, it was so stupid. There's an educational game for you...teaching kids how to calculate probabilities, payoffs, game theory, and nash equilibriums using a simple choice game!

I thought that show was characterized by people who didn't understand math.

Like The Lottery.

They certainly didn't know how to compute expected value.

But the host would tell them that, right?

Nope, it's in their economic self-interest (the TV show) not to have people win most of the time. I'm sure the show/host have a pretty good understanding of math and actuarial sciences to determine how likely and how often and how much people would win and the effect on their rattings/bottom line.

How many people won a million dollars on who wants to be a millionaire? Tangential, but nonetheless an interesting question.

Wikipedia to the rescue:

Eleven contestants have answered the final question correctly and won the top prize (nine on the ABC version, two on the syndicated version). An additional two contestants won $1,000,000 without answering the final question: Robert "Bob-O" Essig on Super Millionaire, and Sam Murray in the Tournament of 10. Only one contestant, Ken Basin, has answered the $1,000,000 question incorrectly.

I wonder how many total contestants there have been. Roughly one contestant per season to win $1m; I'd wager at least 100 contestants per season. Seems like a great ROI for the show; highly-rated prime time for so many years I'm sure they earned top dollar.

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Ratings

The nighttime version initially drew in up to 30 million viewers a day three times a week, an unheard-of number in modern network television. In the 1999–2000 season, it averaged #1 in the ratings against all other television shows with 28,848,000 viewers. In the next season (2000–01), three nights out of the five weekly episodes placed in the top 10.[5] However, the show's ratings began to fall during the 2000–01 season, and by the start of the 2001–02 season, the ratings were only a fraction of what they had been one year before. ABC's reliance on the show's popularity led the network to fall quickly from its former spot as the nation's most watched network.

More than a thousand contestants overall. Might have been closer to 2000, actually.