PUBLICATION CENTER

However, oil, while it might not be king anymore, is still a vital cog in the machinery that operates the city. Given its standing as a gateway to the U.S. with the Houston Ship Channel winding its way from the Gulf of Mexico to the city, the Offshore Energy Center decided to address the need to educate local school children about the industry and how it works through a traveling exhibit called the Mobile Offshore Learning Unit, or MOLU for short.

Enter Southwest Museum Services, also based in Houston, but well known the world over for its innovative and interactive exhibits (click here to see last month’s issue of Expand for more information about the company’s Reagan Ranch Center project).

“Science education is very important in all the technology fields, and in the area of energy there’s a particular demand for that, since there’s actually very little understanding of what’s involved in the process,” says Charles Fleming of Southwest Museum Services.

So Southwest Museum Services sprung into action and created six rolling kiosks, each of which unfolds like a blooming flower into different interactive activities and games.

Made from stainless steel and high-pressure laminates and topped with graphics printed on LexJet 7 Mil Ultra Photo Satin laminated with LexJet 5 Mil T-Flex, the combination has proved over a year’s time to be extremely durable and impervious to the prying fingers of the children who operate the kiosks.

Each kiosk has four activities. For instance, Fleming says they had to find ways to explain relatively complex concepts like seismology to school children. The exhibit on seismology utilizes a pinball-like machine with four separate stoppers that sends the steel balls into three different materials. Each material makes a different sound when it’s struck, similar to the way a signal bounces back from an offshore rig indicating the rock types below.

The entire process of offshore oil production relies on multiple scientific disciplines, so not only do children learn practical science lessons with various real-world and classroom applications, they find out a lot more about one of the area’s primary economic drivers. And, they learn that petroleum products permeate the modern world. In fact, it would be a much less modern world without petroleum products, such as plastics.

Fleming estimates that MOLU travels to 75 schools each year. There is little time or opportunity for maintenance, he says, and the exhibit has held up extremely well. Fleming credits much of this durability success story to advances in materials, both in the structure and the graphics that adorn the structure.

“The materials have improved so much over the years. I can remember back in the mid-90s when we had to tell our clients to be careful about changes in humidity because any change could affect the durability of the graphics,” says Fleming. “Here, we used the right materials for the job. The graphics don’t show fingerprints and they clean up with minimal effort. Plus, the colors have held up and are still very bright. The detail is very crisp.”