NORTH BRUNSWICK — The time to vote is now.
Cynthia Liang, a fifth-grader at Judd Elementary School in North Brunswick, is among the Top 40 contestants selected out of 33,000 students in the Doodle 4 Google contest.
Liang’s design, called “Harmony,” is about “building a bridge of harmony between mankind and wildlife.”
Using the typical “Google” logo as a template, she changed the colorful letters into a nature scene. On the left side she drew birds, hills and the desert. Separated by a river, the ending letters represent civilization via the Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower, a Chinese pagoda, an Indian temple and an Egyptian pyramid. She then used a rainbow above the scene to connect man with nature.
“I wanted to help the world and help them realize they can help the environment,” the 11-year-old said of the inspiration she received from her after-school Project Wise program and from her overall love of animals and helping the environment.
Liang said she has been drawing since she was younger and took an art class when she was 5. Now drawing is just a hobby. She drew two different doodle designs but chose this one and perfected it over the course of about 10 days.
“I was really excited,” she said about her art teacher calling her into class from recess last week to tell her the news of her selection.
The design was judged based on creativity, adaptation of the theme and artistic quality. Voting is open to the general public now through 5 p.m. May 25. Liang will attend a finalist ceremony May 26 in New York City, and if she wins, she will receive a $10,000 college scholarship and her school will receive $25,000 in computer equipment.
In the meantime, Google representatives Chris Wright and Lindsay Ullman visited Judd Elementary on Tuesday morning to present an assembly for the school. After Liang’s finalist status was announced around May 13, the two employees were sent from California headquarters to New Jersey almost immediately, while gifts like T-shirts, stickers and pencils were shipped to the school by last Friday.
Wright and Ullman discussed the theme of the Google contest, which was “If I could do something, I would …” and how it relates to the founding of the Google company itself: Larry Page and Sergey Brin were attending Stanford University as Ph.D. candidates in 1996 when they decided they wanted to build a bigger computer than they had and to create a way to organize all of the information in the world.
“Two really young guys who had an idea that people would have said was crazy said, ‘We have all this information and we want to organize it.’ … They had a dream,” said Ullman, a native of New York State.
The name Google comes from a word a mathematician used to describe the number 1 plus 100 zeros, which he called “one googol.”
The Montana-born Wright reinforced to the students that anything is possible, no matter your age.
Over the past 10 years or so, Google has reinvented its logo to reflect over 700 variations, such as holidays, famous birthdays, special events, anniversaries and different countries.
The company has also expanded its product base, adding online tools such as language translators, maps and street views, which are actually compiled by Google employees driving around the country with cameras on top of their vehicles.
“Sometimes the surprises you don’t see coming are the surprises that are the most interesting,” Wright said.
Special mention was made at the end of the assembly that Judd Elementary fifth-graders Katie Dang and Erin LaVeille and fourth-grader Alexander Zhao had also entered the contest.
To vote for Liang’s entry, visit www.google.com/doodle4google, click on Vote Now on the right, click on grades 4 to 6, and choose to vote for Region 2, which is Liang’s design.
Contact Jennifer Amato at [email protected].