Looking in at Iowa

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State Finalists and Regional Winners were posted today. More from Official Google Blog:

Starting today, you can vote for your favorite doodle. Your votes will determine the four national finalists. Just make sure to vote soon: you only have until May 18th. The national winner will be announced and the winning doodle will replace our usual logo on the Google homepage on May 22nd. …

More from Google:

Doodle 4 Google is a competition where we invite K-12 students to reinvent Google’s homepage logo. This year we asked U.S. kids to doodle around the theme “What if…?”

Well, the entries are in, and we couldn’t be more impressed. We received thousands of wonderful doodles, and choosing 40 finalists for the public vote had to be one of the most difficult but enjoyable jobs at Google in the past few weeks.

So the kids have done their part, and we’ve done ours. Now it’s your turn to help out by picking your favorite doodles. Your votes will help us select a national winner to replace our usual logo on the Google homepage on May 22, 2008. …

Google says that “you may vote for one doodle per age group.” (Perfect!)

Regional Winner under Grades 4-6, Region 6:

Exploration Space

For my “what if” question, I thought and thought and the idea that kept coming into my head was, what if we could explore all of space. I mean if you think about it, we do not know that much about the universe that we live in.

Name: Joel Weikert

School: Western Hills Elementary

State: Iowa

Regional Winner under Grades 7-9, Region 6:

Perspectives on Escher

What if M.C. Escher and his perspective of unreal possibilities became a mascot for Google. He took our understanding of the world around us and re-examined it using his own personal lens. He helps us see possibilities before we could imagine them. Isn’t that what Google does today by fostering our own ability to invent and share new ideas?

Name: Belinda Mahama

School: Ames Middle School

State: Iowa

Additional Iowa finalists:

K-3: Mara Clark, A.J. Neubaum

4-6: Noelle Johnson

7-9: Jamie Goodman III

10-12: Kyle Culp, Scott Skophammer