Doodle 4 Google public vote now open: California has a winner

Doodle 4 Google is underway. This is the annual contest that lands a student’s artwork on the Google homepage to be seen by multiple millions of users.

Works by 50 state winners are now up for a public vote, and Southern California has a representative. Layla Lee of Fullerton’s Parks Junior High School is among finalists with “Underwater City.”

Doodles, as you may recall, are the works incorporating the search engine giant’s logo that often appear at Google.com. The first doodle -- a stick figure -- was by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. Now, doodles are often elaborate, animated and interactive, thanks to the team of artists that Google has doodling away at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.

Lee’s doodle “is about inventions that allow us to live and move underwater,” the seventh-grader wrote for Google. “It includes tunnels for transportation and sea creatures.”

The grand-prize winner receives a $30,000 college scholarship and will have his or her work featured on the Google homepage on June 9. Also, the winner’s school gets $50,000.

Aaron Beaver, who runs the art program at Parks Junior High, told the Los Angeles Times that he had his students participate in Doodle 4 Google as a class assignment, “but Layla was an independent contestant. ... Basically she kicked our butts.” But that doesn’t stop Beaver from being “extremely proud.” He said if the Fullerton school wins the $50,000, it would likely be used to upgrade the computer lab, a win for the art program as well as the school at large.

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