Using OOGEEP lessons in Material Science and Chemistry classes

Michael Beam of Morgan High School shares how he used teacher workshop activities with his Material Science and Chemistry students at Morgan High School:

This past June I was able to attend the OOGEEP STEM workshop in Marietta. The class materials were informative and the hands-on activities were exactly the things I was looking for to add some tangible support for my students. The material is relevant to the current job market and would hopefully help spark my students' interest in this industry. 

Petrochemicals and products
I started out by introducing my Material Science students to the job board and then showing them a few of the videos related to the jobs for the oil and gas industry. Most of my Material Science students are in a career technical program, so I felt this would help them gain an understanding of the relevance of their career tech program. This class covers glass, metals, ceramics, wood, composites, and polymers. I used my new-found knowledge of petrochemistry and polymers gained from the workshop as the framework for the introduction. We started with a discussion of the meaning of 'polymers', where they came from, and what products were made by the petrochemical industry.  

I showed several videos on petrochemical products during the discussion because the students' thoughts kept coming back to oil, gasoline and diesel products. I had the students make a collage of materials from their lives that are produced from polymers. Before class was over, I gave them the exit questionnaire to evaluate their knowledge gained; this showed that they had learned the objective of the lesson and had a new-found understanding of polymers in their everyday life.

Refining and processing
In my Chemistry classes, they need to know the physical and chemical properties of different solids, liquids, and gases. One of those physical properties is melting and boiling points of different compound or mixtures. I felt that a distillation lab that I'd seen at the workshop would help show the students the different boiling points in a mixture of mouthwash.

I introduced the topic of Oil and Gas when talking about the chemical and physical properties of different materials. I asked them how we get so many products from one barrel of oil and how that process takes place. I showed them the OOGEEP video Refining of Natural Gas and Crude Oil on how petroleum is fractionally distilled to produce many other products. They began to understand the importance of distilling mixtures at different temperatures, condensing them and capturing them separately. The students were then onto the real distillation for mouthwash.

The students used 200ml of mouthwash at different temperatures to try to separate out several different individual compounds. They looked at the ingredients on the mouthwash label, then researched the boiling points of most of the compounds. Their work was very close to the percent alcohol from the mouthwash (26 percent). The other fractions that they concluded from their temperatures were water and benzoate (with some caramel additive). The students gained a great deal of knowledge and experience about chemical properties and distillation fracturing from the lab.

Overall, I feel that the time spent in the OOGEEP STEM Science Teachers class was extremely worthwhile for myself and for my students here at Morgan High School. The tools that they provided for me to use in the classroom and the opportunities that OOGEEP can give students in the workforce speak volumes for the organization.