Student STEM Workshop at the Offshore Technology Conference

On May 8, 2025, Energy4me held a successful Student STEM Workshop at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston with nearly 100 students from the Houston area to learn about the industry. NEED had the pleasure of facilitating the student workshop. The workshop was sponsored by ExxonMobil.

Check out this great video produced by the Drilling Contractor that highlights the student STEM workshop – https://drillingcontractor.org/otc-workshop-brings-high-school-students-closer-to-energy-production-73036.

NEED has worked for several years with the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) to provide teacher and student workshops at the Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) held each year in Houston, TX during the month of May. The workshops have focused on various energy topics with an emphasis on oil and gas exploration and production.

This year, Paige McCown with SPE, asked NEED to come up with an activity more focused on offshore oil production. Working from an idea presented by a NEED associate several years ago, NEED Curriculum Director, Emily Hawbaker, developed an idea of using a blindfold and gloves on an individual to represent a remotely operated vehicle working in an offshore environment. This individual would receive instructions from other individuals on how to move their hands to find a bolt and a proper sized nut, assemble them into a single unit and transfer the completed unit to a container, again while blindfolded and wearing gloves. The students did an amazing job in carrying out the assigned duties and seemed to enjoy the activities. Roles were changed to allow all students to experience the concept of working remotely. Feedback from the students indicated that it gave them a better understanding of some of the difficulties in working remotely at great ocean depths in finding and extracting petroleum products.

NEED will continue to develop this activity and try it with different groups of students to refine and improve what we think was a successful start of a new NEED activity. Stay tuned, offshore wind may be next!

View photos of this year’s OTC as well as past years at https://need-media.smugmug.com/OTC.

Blog written by NEED Facilitator Vernon Kimball (5/20/25).