The Sumerian Game

In 1962, the Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) of Westchester County, New York, began a series of discussions with researchers at IBM about the use of computers in education research. The BOCES system had been established in New York to help rural school districts pool resources, and the Westchester BOCES Superintendent Dr. Noble Gividen believed that computers, along with computer simulation games like the Carnagie Tech Management Game being used in colleges, could be used to improve educational outcomes at small districts in Westchester. BOCES and IBM held a joint workshop, led by Bruse Moncreiff and James Dinneen of IBM along with Dr. Richard Wing, curriculum research coordinator for BOCES, in June 1962, involving ten teachers from the area to discuss ways of using simulations in classroom curricula.

The project began in February 1963 under the direction of Dr. Wing, who asked for proposals from nine teachers. One of the teachers, Mabel Addis, proposed an expansion of an idea made by Moncreiff at the summer workshop: an economic model of a civilization, intended to teach basic economic theory. Moncreiff had been inspired by prior research, especially the paper "Teaching through Participation in Micro-simulations of Social Organization" by Richard Neier, and by the board game Monopoly, and wanted to use the ancient Sumerian civilization as the setting to counter what he saw as a trend in school curriculum to ignore pre-Greek civilizations, despite evidence of their importance to early history. Addis, a fourth-grade teacher at Katonah Elementary School, agreed with Moncreiff about the undervaluation of pre-Greek civilizations in schools, and had studied Mesoptamian civilizations in college. Her proposal was approved, and she began work with IBM programmer William McKay to develop the game.

The game itself, The Sumerian Game, was designed and written by Addis and programmed by McKay in the Fortran programming language for an IBM 7090 time-shared mainframe computer. Like many early mainframe games, it was only run on a single computer. Commands were entered and results printed with an IBM 1050 teleprinter. The researchers ran one play session with 30 sixth-grade students. Project 1948 concluded in August 1964, and a report on its outcome given to the Office of Education in 1965 listing the eight subprojects that had been proposed in it, of which The Sumerian Game was the only game.

While mostly forgotten by history it did inspire the the game Hamurabi which became hugely popular in the late 60s and early 70s. The game is designed for fourth grade students.

The script of the game was revised multiple time until funding ran out in 1967.