A couple of years ago I attended an introductory course on scheme. about halfway through the second or third lesson one of the students objected on religious grounds to the example presented by the instructor, which simulated some basic statistical operations involving a deck of cards. This guy proceeded to file a complaint with some review board and the course had to be modified to avoid mentioning anything to do with hands or sets of playing cards. Not even games, just groupings of shuffled cards.

But similar examples featuring probabilities of outcomes in a relay race were deemed suitable despite the obvious nerfing of the model required to set the capabilities of all runners to be equal.

> dice? Or coins?

The labs were about these things (and cards), and therefore gambling. We had to do purely abstract labs instead. The issue is that probability is hard to teach even with visceral physical examples of sampling from distributions.