Doodle 4 Google 2014 contest concludes as Google awards $30,000 top prize to a young girl from New York for her nature-inspired drawing.
Google, the biggest internet search company, announced its annual Doodle 4 Google contest in February this year, challenging aged four to 18 to draw innovative designs for its homepage. The theme for this year's contest was to draw something to make the world a better place. Thousands of children from Kindergarten to twelfth grade put out their creative thoughts onto the canvas and submitted them to Google. After sifting through more than 100,000 submissions, Google finally selected an 11-year-old New Yorker, Audrey Zhang, as the winner of the Doodle 4 Google 2014 contest.
Google has been conducting its Doodle contest for seven consecutive years and has an organized process to carry it out each year. Out of the total number of submissions, Google filtered 250 state finalists then narrowed it down to 50 state winners and 5 national age group winners, announced in May. Zhang's winning art stood out in the crowd with its deep message of making the world a better place.
"To make the world a better place, I invented a transformative water purifier," Zhang said, according to Google. "It takes in dirty and polluted water from rivers, lakes, and even oceans, then massively transforms the water into clean, safe and sanitary water, when humans and animals drink this water, they will live a healthier life."
Zhang along with 50 other state winners spent a day with the Doodle team. As the winner of the 2014 contest, Zhang was the first one to have the opportunity of turning her doodle into an animation. "As an animator and director for a day, she made sure we twinkled each light and cleaned the water just right and took extra care for the illustration's dragons-about whom she is also writing a novel," Google product marketing manager Liat Ben-Rafael said in a blog post, Monday.
Zhang's Doodle artwork was titled "Back to Mother Nature," which not only won her a $30,000 college scholarship and a $50,000 Google for Education technology grant for her school but also inspired Google to donate $20,000 towards a charity in Zhang's name. The charity will use that money to provide clean water and latrines to schools in Bangladesh.
