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These are all good projects but you are underestimating the difficulty of them by a lot. Even something conceptually simple like card counting has a lot of details that are difficult to get right. Just programming the rules of blackjack is a fiddly problem in itself (no standard ruleset and hard to explain the edge cases).

In my opinion these would be great things to introduce at the start of a course for motivation, but they either need a lot of handholding/scaffolding or a lot more time per project. There is a tradeoff between how much handholding you do and how much people learn. It's very easy for people to fool themselves into thinking they understand something just because they can follow along while someone else does all the thinking for them.

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I'd say this view overestimates both the depth and abstraction at which people actually understand the things they do in the course of normal living. These exercises won't turn anyone into a trivia master or gatekeeper, but it will give them working knowledge.

The point is that each of these things requires actually doing them and they are fun enough to practice, so nobody merely follows along. Sure, a class of 30-40 kids won't be able to do it, but that's the worst possible way to teach anyone anything while only guaranteeing they are all evenly disadvantaged.

A blackjack tournament or poker tournament over a few days is enough to get card counting principles down, and even if you are crap at it, you understand that probability is a thing, it has distributions, it's not always right, and you can bet against other peoples ability to interpret them.