Mahee Chandrasekhar, a 9th grader at Redmond High School in Redmond, Wash., is the Washington state winner in the 16th annual “Doodle for Google” contest.
Mahee, 15, is one of 55 state and territory winners announced by the tech giant on Wednesday. Her artwork was selected from tens of thousands of submissions.
In celebration of Google’s 25th anniversary, students were asked to answer the prompt: “My wish for the next 25 years.”
Mahee submitted an artwork titled “Small but Mighty” (above) and provided the following response to the prompt:
“My wish for the next 25 years is for us to honor the smallest, but mightiest of us all, the pollinators, who through their small size, truly help make the world brighter.”
“Mahee has been an artist ever since I have given her a pen and pencil,” said her father Chandrasekhar Goka. “She has loved to create art, and enjoys creating art from abstract to real, and expressing herself through many facets of science, and technology, and bringing thoughtfulness to real problems..”
Goka said when Mahee was young, she would go to a local organic farm to observe how bees collect nectar from one flower to the next and pollinate the flowers that grow into fruits, nuts and vegetables.
“Mahee loves nature, and as she started to learn science, she started to understand that their are many ecosystems that help us survive and thrive in this world,” Goka said. “She wanted to bring attention to the fact that protecting these ecosystems long term would not only help us, but help our growth and vitality of our society for the next 25 years.”
Goka also credited Mahee’s mother Dr. Sudha Gulkhandia and aunt Sangeeta Vinit with being instrumental in her art education.
Mahee received Google hardware and swag for her achievement.
Rebecca Wu, a sixth grader from Bellevue, Wash., won the entire contest last year and had her artwork in the featured spot on Google’s homepage. She also won a $30,000 college scholarship and a $50,000 technology grant for her school.
