Google on Thursday selected a California second grader as the winner of this year's Doodle 4 Google competition.
Matteo Lopez's doodle will appear on the Google homepage tomorrow, May 20, and he will take home a $15,000 college scholarship and a $25,000 technology grant for his school.
The theme of this year's contest was "What I'd like to do someday," and Lopez, a student at San Francisco's Monte Verde Elementary, created a space-inspired doodle.
"Matteo's doodle of the Google logo artfully depicts a trip to space, walking on the moon, and even making friends with aliens," Marissa Mayer, vice president of product management, wrote in a blog post. "Matteo has already soared to great heights, rising to the top of the more than 107,000 submissions sent in from all over the country."
Google also selected three finalists: fourth grader Joseph Eugene Miller from Wilmington, NC, who also selected a space theme; seventh grader Justas Varpucanskis from Mokena, IL, who depicted an underwater universe; and high school junior Hannah Newsom from Fayetteville, AR, who would like to be an illustrator. All three will receive a $5,000 scholarship. See them all in the slideshow above.
All 40 finalist doodles will be on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York through June 16 and at SFMOMA in San Francisco from May 20 through July 19.
Google, meanwhile, has made headlines for its own in-house homepage doodles, including an interactive undersea-themed drawing in honor of author Jules Verne's 183rd birthday and 17 holiday-themed doodles that were live for two days in December. Recently, Google.com also featured 16 homepage doodles in honor of what would have been the 76th birthday of children's author Roger Hargreaves, who wrote the Mr. Men and Little Miss series, and dancer/choreographer Martha Graham.
Recently, it was revealed that Google obtained a patent for its popular homepage doodles, covering "systems and methods for enticing users to access a Web site."
Doodles from the top 40 regional finalists are available on Google's Web site.
For more on Google's doodles, see the slideshow below.