SPE education initiative Energy4me held its first Russian teacher workshop during the SPE Russian Oil and Gas Exploration and Production Technical Conference and Exhibition in Moscow on 16 October, the final day of the three-day event.
After a greeting from 2014 SPE Russian and Caspian Regional Director Andrey Gladkov—who stressed the industry’s growing demand for more technical training of young students—student members from Gubkin State University of Oil and Gas in Moscow led the 14 attending middle and secondary school teachers in a series of classroom experiments designed to demonstrate different scientific concepts involved in the upstream oil and gas industry. The seven exercises explored several oil and gas areas, including production, with “Getting the Oil Out,” where participants used common classroom materials to transport liquids, and “Forms and Sources of Energy,” which educates students about how heat, friction, and other actions create energy. After the experiments, teachers learned ways to include downstream topics in their lesson plans with “The Peak Oil Game,” which focused on refining and products.
Later in the session, teachers were given a tour of the conference’s exhibition area to see oilfield technology up close and to learn about employment opportunities in the oil and gas industry. Energy4me closed the workshop by providing instructors with teaching materials to reproduce the day’s experiments in their own classrooms.
