A SIX-YEAR-OLD Dublin schoolgirl will have her art work showcased to hundreds of thousands of internet users tomorrow when it is featured on Google’s Irish homepage.
Layla Karpuz from the senior infants class at Mary Mother of Hope Junior National School, Dublin 15, won Google’s third Irish Doodle 4 Google competition.
Layla’s winning redesign of the Google logo was chosen as overall winner by the search engine’s web designer and “senior doodler”, Mike Dutton, who travelled from Google headquarters in California especially for the event.
Google regularly features variations of its logo, called “doodles”, to mark anniversaries and events.
“In my picture you can see love hearts, curls, shamrocks, people with fancy hats, people going on a bear hunt, grass men (men disguised as grass), plants, shamrock plants for Ireland, grannies and a caterpillar, because I like searching for caterpillars,” explained Layla. “I used different colours in my picture because it looks nice. I like my picture!”
Her school will receive a €10,000 technology boost, while both Layla and her class teacher will receive a laptop.
A shortlist of 60 regional finalists was announced by Google in January. Following over 63,000 online votes by the public, the four doodles with the highest number of votes were selected for the national finals in Dublin yesterday.
The other finalists were Ella O’Hagan, Scoil Íosagáin, Co Donegal; Vicky Enright, Salesian secondary, Limerick; and Niamh Byrne, Presentation secondary, Tipperary. Each won a laptop for themselves and their teacher.
