“Saving the World” as an Emergent Theme in the K-12 Doodle for Google Competition

Introduction
In a world with seven billion people, numerous ongoing wars, and the well-documented and widespread destruction of natural ecosystems, one might well ask, “Does the health of the planet concern today’s children?” One interesting way to answer this question is to look at the results of an art contest for grades K-12 hosted by the world’s most popular search engine, Google. The “Doodle 4 Google” competition asked children to submit artwork in response to the open-ended question, “What I’d like to do someday…” The theme that emerged in the #2 position, second only to “Animals”, was “Saving the World.”

Materials, Methods, Limitations, Biases
The 400 winning entries (two per state for each of four grade divisions, or eight per state, for each of the 50 states) of the “Doodle 4 Google 2011” competition were reviewed, with evaluation of both title and visual content. Each entry was then tallied according to categories. A category had to have at least two entries in order to be listed. Any one entry might be tallied in more than one category; for example, a picture depicting space exploration with the title “I Want to Be an Astronaut” might be tallied in the categories “Career”, “Space”, and “Explore”; however, no entry was tallied more than once in any single category.

In categorizing each entry, every effort was made to consider the title and symbolic content and to avoid allowing tone, artistic style, or ability to influence placement. For example, a picture clearly depicting a heart might be placed in the category of “Peace” based on the symbolic content, whereas a picture of butterflies painted in soft pastels might be placed in the category of “Animals” alone even if the tone was peaceful, unless a title such as “World Peace” clearly affirmed the artist’s intention for peace.

Despite this attempt at objectivity, of course, viewer bias remains one of the primary limitations of this study, and it would be informative to have multiple independent viewers perform the same categorization. Categorization of all 400 images was done twice, with a time lapse of one week in between viewing, yielding almost identical results between the two efforts.

Another limitation is that only the 400 winning entries immediately available online were reviewed, whereas approximately 100,000 entries were submitted. While a priori selection of these 400 winning entries may have been influenced by unpublished biases by the judges, the only published criteria had no mention of content. The four selection criteria were as follows:
• Artistic merit: based on grade group and artistic skill
• Creativity: based on the representation of the theme and use of the Google logo
• Theme communication: how well the theme is expressed
• Appropriateness of the supporting statement
As “Saving the World” is a broad category, a bias of this study is the inclusion of any major ecosystem, such as “rainforest”, in “the world”—however, an entry depicting a rainforest or rainforest animals would only be included in the “Saving the World” category only if the title said something like “Save the Rainforest.” Furthermore, in each age group, a distinctive category of “World” emerged without explicit words or symbolism to suggest “Saving the World” (if an entry was tallied in one of these, it was excluded from the other). A broader interpretation of “Saving the World” might have including these entries (32 in total) because of the implicit tone of most of them.

In ranking the categories, the first consideration was total number of entries, followed by the number of entries in grades K-3, and then by grades 7 through 9. One category (“Fashion”, with 6 entries) was moved down in rank below those with only 5 entries because it was not represented by entries in at least two non-contiguous grade divisions. This yield an arbitrary but useful division into 31 “major” (i.e., those with at least 5 entries AND representation by entries in at least two non-contiguous grade divisions) and 20 “minor” categories or themes.


Results
The categorization of the 400 entries into the top 51 categories (all those with at least 2 entries) is shown in Table 1.

As Table 1 shows, the top theme is “Animals” when considering all four age groups totaled together, with 57 entries. However, the 23 “Animal” entries from grades K-3 constitute the largest proportion of these 57 entries. “Saving the World” was second only to “Animals” in grades K-3 and “Art” in grades 4-6, and emerged in first place in both of the two upper grade divisions.

If one tallies together the categories of “Clean Energy”, “Clean Water”, “Pollution”, “Green/Recycling”, “Local/Organic”, “Hunger” and “Climate Change” into a “Planet” category, there are 54 total entries. Only 16 of these were tallied in “Saving the World”, meaning that there were 38 unique entries within these categories. This would put it in 3rd place just behind “Saving the World” and above “Art”.

Table 2 displays representative titles for some of the top categories.


Discussion
“Animals” and “Saving the World” emerge by a substantial margin as the top two themes. If one considers the aggregate “Planet” category mentioned above, this comes in at number three; summing the entries for “Saving the World” and “Planet” yields a total that is far and away the number one theme, well above even “Animals”.

As described above, the entries in number three “World” were not tallied in “Saving the World”; a broader interpretation of including these would again—independent of the “Planet” entries—put “Saving the World” well above “Animals”.

The other two most populated categories in the top five, “Art” and “Imagine/Dream”, might suggest that children who submit artwork are more inclined towards art and idealism than their non-submitting peers, and that we might get a different result if we were to require that every child in a population submit artwork and tally the results.

At the same time, even within this perhaps-more-idealistic cohort, themes that one might expect to have more numbers simply don’t. “Space” and “Sports” come in at #10 and #17, with 16 and 11 entries respectively, less than a third of the number in “Saving the World.” “Peace” (#18; 11 entries) has as many entries as “Sports”. If one adds the 8 entries of “Cooperation”, these 19 entries would rise above “Space.”

It is interesting to see that within “Learning/Teaching” (#6; 22 entries) and “Science” (#14, 13 entries), the highest number of entries is in grades K-3. These categories both reach a nadir of two entries apiece in grades 7-9. One explanation is the probable transference of some of these entries into more concrete ambitions, as evidenced by the growing numbers in “Invent/Build” between K-3 and 7-9.

Overall, this study might give encouragement to anyone interested in a healthier planet and a more hopeful future. Regardless of the above-mentioned limitations and biases, the clearly dominant themes all had to do with preservation of our natural world. The biggest limitation of this paper, in attempting to categorize and define trends in this sample of children’s artwork, is that one cannot here see the art itself. One can go to the internet and search “Doodle 4 Google” in order to more fully appreciate the intentions, not to mention creativity and expressiveness, of these K-12 schoolchildren.