Our second guest judge, Chicago native Peter CottonTale, is a Grammy Award-winning producer, composer, musical director and artist.

This led to the launch of “Dav Pilkey at Home,” a collaboration with the Library of Congress and Scholastic which provides free online content for kids and families during the pandemic lock down.

Dav explores themes like kindness, courage, empathy and doing good in his unique graphic novels, and he recently created a series of read-aloud and how-to-draw videos to encourage kids to be creative. Today, his #1 bestselling “Dog Man” series has 40 million copies in print, has been translated into 40 languages and is being developed as a feature film by DreamWorks. While alone in the hallway, he drew and created stories that evolved into his books. As a child, our first guest judge Dav was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD and was often sent out in the hallway during class.

Inner strength is something all of our judges have relied on. Dav Pilkey, best-selling book author and illustrator (“Dog Man,” “Captain Underpants” and “Cat Kid Comic Club”), Grammy Award-winning producer and artist Peter CottonTale and 2020’s National Teacher of the Year Tabatha Rosproy will join us as guest judges. This year we have an impressive judging panel helping us to determine our 54 state and territory winners and five national finalists, one of whom will go on to be the national grand prize winner. When you make mistakes or get scared, what helps you clear the clouds above your head? When people around you are feeling down, how do you use your inner strength to lift them up? That idea of inner strength felt like a natural theme to bring into our 13th annual Doodle for Google contest: The 2021 contest theme is “I am strong because…” We’re asking students to creatively share how they keep moving forward when things get tough. While nothing could have prepared us for the highs and lows of last year, we somehow managed to grow a little stronger. No one knew how to parent through a pandemic (that wasn’t in the handbook) but my family's chats kept coming back to the concept of being strong – for ourselves and for others. As a mother of three young children, it was filled with important conversations and loads of feelings as we took on distance learning, quarantining and even changes like wearing masks. 2020 was a challenging year for many of us.

Today's doodle of google