I enjoyed reading the article cited below. However, I think the title is quite misleading. The errors were in engineering design and implementation. All of the examples were deadly serious errors.

Radomile, Chris (1/9/2012). Six Small Math Errors That Caused Huge Disasters. Cracked.com. Retrieved 1/11/2012 from http://www.cracked.com/article_19623_6-small-math-errors-that-caused-huge-disasters.html.

Here is one of the six examples:

If you were in Boston in the '30s and '40s and you weren't a complete square, you went to the Cocoanut Grove. It was the most-happening nightclub in town, and anybody who was anybody went there. OK, so sometimes it was a bit cramped and they liked to stuff as many people in there as possible, well over double the allowed capacity of 460, but this was our granddaddy's day. People were tougher back then! They didn't have warning labels and safety features plastered all over the place, and they got along just fine.

Until 1942, when a fire killed 492 people.

But the thing is, most of those people died not due to fire, but due to door hinges.

 …

Of the many safety violations, including overcapacity and decorating the nightclub with dry pine needles, there was one fatal flaw that you wouldn't even think of: Namely, that the exit doors all swung inward.

The main entrance was a revolving door that quickly became jammed with people trying to get out, so they flocked to other entrances and were pressed against the doors so hard that they couldn't open. The fire department estimated that if the doors had swung out, over 300 people could have survived.

This particular example indicates a lack of common sense. We all make decisions throughout our daily lives. Sometimes we think carefully about possible effects of our decisions—and sometime we act with little or no foresight. Professionals are paid to have good foresight. Young children and many students lack this foresight.

One of the goals of both informal and formal education is to help learners gain increased insight into the possible effects of the actions they are considering. Computer simulations can provide good environments for learning to make good decisions and for seeing the consequences of poor decisions. Nowadays, children routinely encounter such situations in the computer games they play.