Middle School Students Invent Eco-friendly Sunscreen

As part of their FIRST LEGO League project, a group of University School of Milwaukee Middle School students needed to identify and research a problem that correlated with this year’s theme of exploring the oceans. After considering several potential projects, Sam Yuan ’29 presented his teammates with an idea—creating a non-toxic sunscreen—that had a personal connection. “I’m a part of the albinism community, so I’m really susceptible to skin cancer because of my lack of melanin,” Yuan said. “I was reading about certain sunscreens that were banned in Australia because their chemicals damaged coral reefs, and I thought it could be a great research problem for our innovation project.” The team members (pictured, from left) Ben Raphael ’30, Yuan, Viraj Kamath ’29, and Sophie Kouklin ’29 agreed, and a project was born.

They began by consulting with licensed aesthetician Caitlin Catarozoli, who pointed them in the direction of natural ingredients, like raspberry seed oil and carrot seed oil, that contain SPF. They then used an innovative tool to help refine their formula—ChatGPT. “AI helped us determine the order of ingredients to add, the amounts, what temperature to heat them up to, if it needed to cool down before adding certain ingredients—things like that,” said Kamath.

After many hours of research and planning, the team was ready to begin production of the sunscreen. They started by heating and mixing some of the oils together using a hot plate and magnetic stirrer, but were thrown off by the initial appearance. “It looked yellow,” said Kamath, “like melted butter.” The formulation thickened up after adding zinc oxide, however, and began to resemble sunscreen.

The team tested their sunscreen against mass-market sunscreens using UV-sensitive paper, and found it to be the second-best performing formula of the ones they tested. But the sunscreen isn’t the only component that’s eco-friendly—the bottle is, too. “We originally wanted to use plastic that would decompose into methane and carbon dioxide, but those are greenhouse gases,” said Kouklin. “So instead, we’re making our bottle out of glycerol, corn starch, water, and vinegar,” she said. The resulting material, which is hard like plastic, decomposes into biodegradable glucose.

In addition to the innovation project (the eco-friendly sunscreen and packaging, presentation, and website), the team still had to design, build, and code a robot capable of completing missions and competing against robots from other FIRST teams across the region. After their winning performances at regional and sectional competitions, team World Whales is continuing on to the state competition in January 2025. At the sectional competition, the team won first place in innovation and was nominated for the Champions Award, given to the team that achieves excellence and innovation in robot performance and design, and the innovation project. Meanwhile their coach, 8th grade science teacher Nicola De Torre, won the coaches award.  

The team is committed to continuing their work on the sunscreen after the robotics season has ended, and are even in the preliminary stages of working with a lawyer on a pro-bono basis to pursue a chemical patent application. “This project was a lot of work, but we all contributed and learned a lot,” said Raphael.