14 DAY TRIAL // This year's Doodle 4 Google competition is in the final stages as the 40 regional winners have been announced. 40 talented kids from across the US have been picked for their inspiring creations and it's time for everyone to get involved and vote for the work they like the most.
"Today, we’re thrilled to introduce the 40 Regional Finalists for this year’s U.S. Doodle 4 Google contest. This year we had a record number of submissions—more than 107,000 from talented student artists from every state across the country," Marissa Mayer, VP of Product Management at Google, announced.
"We were amazed and delighted by not only the quantity of submissions but the caliber of this year’s entries," she added.
"Our doodle team, volunteer Googlers and incredibly talented Guest Judges helped us determine the 40 Regional Finalists. Whoopi Goldberg, Evan Lysacek, Michael Phelps and Jim Davis (just to name a few) lent a hand to help find the cream of the artistic crop," she explained.
Googlers will be visiting all of the regional finalists at their schools today to congratulate them on their achievement.
Now that the regional winners have been determined, there are 10 of them for each age group, comes the voting phase. Until May 13, anyone will be able to vote on their favorite doodles.
The winner will be announced on May 19 and will receive $15,000 for a college scholarship as well as $25,000 for a new computer lab in his or her school.
The winning doodle will be displayed on the Google homepage globally on May 20, but all of finalist doodles will be displayed in exhibitions at Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and at SFMOMA in San Francisco.
This year's competition started in January and Google has since collected the tens of thousands of submissions which have been narrowed down to 400 state finalists and finally to the 40 regional finalists.