Students awash in learning during annual soap project

By Dan Nakaso
Advertiser Staff Writer

Saint Louis chemistry students Andrew McKee and Kenneth Carroll cut raw soap into squares as part of a project that involves such skills as research and marketing. Photos by Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser

Students show off their finished products. One team's soaps took the shape of sports equipment.

"Touchdown symbolizes winners," said Andrew Blanco, a 16-year-old sophomore at Saint Louis School, one of Hawai'i's perennial football juggernauts. "It's for Saint Louis."

But getting the intended light blue color for their soap proved much more problematic for the Touchdown team.

"We added too much red," said sophomore Andrew McKee, 15, the team's quality-control engineer.

So the 24 members of the team ended up with 2 pounds of pink soap in St. Louis School's sixth annual project that takes a chemistry exercise in making soap and turns it into mock businesses that stretch the students' research, engineering, advertising and accounting skills.

Chemistry teachers Jeff Judd and Jon Yoshioka borrowed the idea from a chemistry magazine and now end each school year with a three-week project to produce and market soap aimed at the St. Louis School audience.

Students in various chemistry classes first have to create rÚsumÚs and apply for various jobs. Each team also needs students to be in charge of the real-life responsibilities of advertising and marketing, engineering and various other duties necessary to run a soap-producing operation.

The soap isn't ready for use or sale by the time school ends. But the students still go through the motions of marketing their soaps, from campus displays to commercials on the school's morning television broadcasts.

One group's commercial dragged on for five minutes, which annoyed large segments of the school community, Judd said.

The students who produced the offending commercial then e-mailed an apology across the campus in another real-life lesson called crisis management.

Reach Dan Nakaso at dnakaso@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8085.