History is cool for school

Posted by Oliver Rickman, UK Corporate Communications Team, and Kate Hammond, UK Product Marketing Team

You might be thinking most kids are only interested in celebrities and the next cool thing -- but not 15,000 British kids. This lot, between the ages of 4 and 18, ditched celebrity-watching in favour of good old-fashioned historical figures when they sent in their drawings to our Doodle 4 Google competition. (You may recall our informal name for this contest was "Day Off for Dennis.") Given the theme of ‘My Britain’ as their inspiration, school children up and down the UK got creative with the Google logo, hoping to see their entry on the Google homepage. Nearly half (45%) of their entries included monuments and historical figures from Big Ben to the Blackpool tower, and from the Queen to Shakespeare. Everyone at the London Googleplex was really impressed with how passionate the kids were about Britain, not to mention their talent.

And though some of you may laugh about British food, we were proud to see that a quarter of entries featured fish and chips, proving what we all already knew – that you can’t beat traditional British grub!

On Monday and Tuesday, we met thousands of children whose entries made it into the finals at the Science Museum in London. The wrapup gave them a chance to check out each others' designs and talk about their Doodles -- and of course it gave us the exciting job of announcing and congratulating the fantastic winner, 13-year-old Katherine Chisnall, from the South West of England. Aside from her day of fame on the Google.co.uk homepage, Katherine and her family will be soon be visiting our world headquarters in Mountain View, California. The whole event was great fun, and who knows? Maybe we've identified some rising stars for Dennis' crew.