A fifth-grader from Albert S. Hall School in Waterville is the state finalist in the eighth annual Doodle 4 Google competition, a contest open to kindergarten through 12th-grade students across the United States.
Karin Zimba is one of the 53 winners across the country with her doodle, “Serendipity.” Contestants were asked to draw a doodle redesigning the Google logo inspired by the theme “What makes me … me.”
Zimba is not only the second Hall student to win the Maine honor in the past three years, but also the second in her family. Her older sister, Inga Zimba, won Maine honors in 2014. The girls are the daughters of Yasameen and Travis Zimba, of Waterville.
Karin’s doodle is a colorful collage of a variety of objects including shells, stones, colored glass, knickknacks, buttons and other items.
She said her doodle came from the fact that she’s “a collector of things I’ve made, objects I’ve found, gifts I’ve received, a token from a memorable day.”
“I like to discover how each object relates to one another and arrange them harmoniously,” she said in a news release from Google. “Collecting reminds me of how we are connected to each other in our own unique way.”
Karin’s doodle was selected from around 100,000 received this year, according to the release.
The national winner — to be determined after a public vote narrows the 53 national finalists down to five — will win a scholarship, and his or her doodle will be displayed as the Google search engine’s daily doodle on its homepage.
A formal announcement and presentation were scheduled for Friday at the school, even though school was canceled because of a snowstorm. A celebration was scheduled for Monday.
This was the first year that the use of nontraditional media was strongly encouraged, the Google release said, and about a quarter of submissions used materials such as clay, papier-mache, leaves and picnic tables.
Voting for the best in five categories began Friday and will continue through Feb. 22 at google.com/doodle4google/vote. Karin’s doodle can be found in the Grades 4-5 category.
Google will announce the five national finalists and the national winner on March 21. The winner’s doodle will go live on Google.com that day, featured as the daily image on the Web search engine.
Winners and finalists also will get to visit Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, to meet and attend a workshop with the company’s team of professional doodlers “and see what it takes to launch a Doodle on the Google homepage,” the release said.
This year, each national finalist also can take on the trip a teacher who has inspired him or her.
The national winner gets a $30,000 college scholarship, and his or her school gets a $50,000 Google for Education grant toward the establishment and improvement of a computer laboratory or technology program, according to the release.
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