So, I have a friend that teaches math at a local high school. (He's also the guy that introduced me to Dominion.) He has a math honors section, and he called me up a couple of days ago and said that he had been pushing the kids pretty hard lately and wanted to do something different for the last week (or whatever) of the school year. He wanted to explore some probability/combinatorics, but he wanted to do it in a way that was both hands-on and could be applied to the external world. His idea was to introduce the kids to Dominion.
I think he'd take one or two periods to introduce them to the game rules and have them play against each other. Then once they understand some of the mechanics, he could start introducing some calculations that could be interesting. Or at least standard math calculations applied to Dominion. Like, what your average money density is, what the probability of colliding terminals might be, what the probability of spiking $5/$6 on turn 3 or 4 is, etc.
There are only 8 students in the class, so it's pretty manageable to have everyone playing in pairs (using just Base and Intrigue, probably a couple copies of each). My main concern was that the part of learning the actual game may be too rushed, and the math involved wouldn't be so tangible as it would if they were experienced with the mechanics. But I thought it would be pretty cool for students to learn something fun, and also to get in the mindset that they should be using basic mathematical skills in their every day lives.
Anyway, I thought I'd pose the idea to the community here and see what you guys think of it.