In line with the nation’s continued Jubilee celebrations, Google Kenya is hosting a month ( 5th-31st May)long gallery exhibition showcasing the Top 100 ‘My Kenya’ doodles from artists aged 6 – 18 years at the Nairobi National Museum, Aga Khan Hall.
Last year, Google launched the first nationwide Doodle 4 Google competition in Kenya Themed ‘My Kenya’, where doodlers celebrated a monumental year in Kenya with the recent national elections, as well as the Jubilee Year. The competition received over 5000 submissions and generated over 13,000 votes on its online voting campaign from which 17 year old Esther Wambui Githinji became the national winner with her doodle, “Feet of Gold,” which was featured on the Google Kenya homepage on Mashujaa Day – 20 October 2013.
Doodle 4 Google (D4G) is a competition in which the search giant invites students to reinvent Google’s homepage logo and to date it has run contests in over 30 countries all over the world. D4G is one way the firm can bring art and technology together while encouraging children to get creative both online and offline.
Doodles are used during celebration of holidays, anniversaries and the lives of famous artists, pioneers and scientists who have helped shape history. Doodles began when in 1998 Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin placed a stick figure drawing behind the second ‘o’ in the word Google as a message to users that they were “out of the office” attending a music and art festival. This birthed the idea of decorating the Googl logo to mark cultural moments as readers enjoyed the quirky change. The same year, a turkey was added on Thanksgiving and two pumpkins replaced the ‘o’s for Halloween the following year.
After two years, Larry and Sergey asked webmaster Dennis Hwang to create a doodle for Bastille Day in France and the appointed him the chief doodler and doodles became more frequent. Since 1998 there have been over 2,000 doodles on the Google home pages around the world.
Doodle are not just a thing for the doodle team or this kids competitions. You can also be part of it by sending your idea to the team at [email protected].