Layla named Ireland's top doodler

Six-year-old Layla Karpuz has been crowned Ireland’s top doodler after winning Google’s third Irish Doodle 4 Google competition.

Layla is a senior infants student from Mary Mother of Hope Junior National School, Dublin 15.

She was selected as overall winner by Google web designer and senior doodler Mike Dutton, who travelled from Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California especially for the event.

Layla’s winning entry entitled “Love Google” will appear on the Google homepage in Ireland on Wednesday this week, where it will be seen by millions of internet users.

Layla’s school will receive a €10,000 technology grant, and Layla and her teacher will also receive a personal laptop computer each.

Entrants in this year’s Doodle 4 Google competition were asked to design a doodle of the Google logo on the theme ‘To me, happiness is..’.

Describing her doodle Layla said: "My picture is about the things that make me feel happy. In my picture you can see love hearts, curls, shamrocks, people with fancy hats, people going on a bear hunt, grass men (men disguised as grass), plants, shamrock plants for Ireland, Grannies and a caterpillar because I like searching for caterpillars. I used different colours in my picture because it looks nice. I like my picture!"

More than 63,000 votes were cast by the public in the online vote and the four doodles with the highest number of votes made it through to the national finals. From these four doodles, Mike Dutton then selected Layla as the overall winner.

The three other national finalists in the Doodle 4 Google competition were: Group 2 Ella O'Hagan, 6th Class, Scoil Iosagain Co. Donegal; Group 3 Vicky Enright, 3rd Year, Salesian Secondary, Limerick and Group 4 Niamh Byrne, 5th Year, Presentation Secondary School, Tipperary.

These students all received a laptop each and a laptop for their teacher.