Google has just announced the winner of the fourth annual Doodle 4 Google competition, a contest that invited K-12 students to create and submit their own design based on the Google logo. And congratulations go to the national winner, 7 year-old Matteo Lopez of South San Francisco. His doodle “Space Life” will be featured on the Google homepage tomorrow.
Matteo’s entry was chosen out of the over 107,000 submitted from all over the U.S. He wins a $15,000 college scholarship, a netbook, and a $25,000 technology grant for his school.
Over 5 million votes were cast by the public, which helped to determine the other three national finalists, Joseph Miller, grade 4 who drew “My Galaxy”; Justas Varpucanskis, grade 7, who drew “The Majestic Sea”; and Hanna Newsom, grade 11, who drew “Illustration” (pictured right).
Google’s Doodles, often timed around holidays and anniversaries, have become quite popular and the Doodle department is very prolific, with over 700 having been designed and displayed internationally.
But Google’s Doodle contest stirred some controversy when it was revealed that, as part of the admissions form, participants were asked to give the last four digital of their Social Security number. As that caused some concerns about privacy and potential identity theft, that information request was quickly pulled from the form.
Google is nearing the end of a voting period for another one of its contests for children and teens too, the Google Science Fair. Voting on the semi-finalists for that contest ends tomorrow, May 20.
