DUNMORE - A Dunmore Elementary Center sixth-grader's art beat out 130,000 entries from kindergarten through grade 12 all over the state to represent Pennsylvania in a national contest.
If Mia Bonavoglia's "A Night at the Museum" bests 49 representatives from the rest of the country in the "Doodle 4 Google" contest, her artwork will be displayed on the search engine's website for a year.
Mia would also win a $30,000 scholarship, and Dunmore Elementary Center would receive $50,000 for technology upgrades from the tech giant if she gets the most votes at www.google.com/doodle4google/vote.html.
The theme for Mia's submission was "my best day ever."
"I really like museums, so I combined all the museums I've been to and made it into one drawing," Mia said in an interview on Thursday.
She drew particular inspiration from the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in creating a picture that spells "Google" through images of a microscope, a telescope and the Big Dipper constellation, a girl examining a globe, a chemical reaction taking place in a beaker, a rocket ship and a woman watering a flower.
Mia decided to make a submission to the contest when her grandmother read about it in the newspaper and then found it online.
The announcement that she won the Pennsylvania portion, coupled with a pep rally held in her honor Wednesday, really surprised her. During Wednesday's pep rally, the mayor proclaimed May 1, 2013, to be Mia Bonavoglia Day.
A blown up version of her art provided by Google will permanently occupy a large white space near all of the trophies on display by the Paul Richards wall observing the Dunmore graduate who went on to become an astronaut.
"This is the biggest thing to happen to the Dunmore school district since we had an astronaut," Vice Principal Margaret Hart said.
If Mia wins, Principal Matthew Quinn said the money the school receives would go toward buying projectors, laptops and Smartboards. He said the 2007 state Classrooms for the Future grant funding dried up before it reached the elementary school, and the building could use updated equipment.
Mia will find out if she won when her family goes on an all-expenses-paid trip to New York City on May 22, around the three day period her work will be on display at the American Museum of Natural History.
School officials noted people can vote for Mia's work once per day with as many devices that connect to the Internet as are available.
Contact the writer: kwind@timesshamrock.com, @kwindTT on Twitter