A Case Study on the Benefits of Implementing an Introductory Short Course on Oil and Gas to High-School Students
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AbstractThis paper highlights the benefits of a five-day short course on the basics of petroleum engineering for high-school students. Moreover, the course aims to introduce the oil and gas sector to students and stimulate their interest in considering petroleum engineering as a major in their future studies. The five-day short course was designed for two contact hours per day (a total of ten hours). The format adopted was approximately one hour covering the technical content, followed by one hour of experimentations. The course was conducted virtually, where the instructor conducted all the experiments. The students were encouraged to participate and take notes to make the session more dynamic. This paper will discuss the exact content covered every day in both lectures and experiments for people to follow. The equipment used in all experiments was very simple and easily procured. Twenty of the student participants filled out a survey at the end of the program. The outcome highly indicates that the students demonstrated a good understanding of the oil and gas sector as well as the objectives of considering petroleum engineering as a major. This program attempts to build bridges between the STEM education pipeline and the new demand for talent in the oil and gas sector. The novelty of this work is the high impact we observed on students motivation and potential enrollment to study petroleum engineering. Overall, the program is short and offers simple yet engaging content. Any school can easily adapt this program, and in this paper, we provide detailed guidelines to do so.
