Pharrell, Georgia Tech, and Amazon Announce Winners of Music Coding Initiative

The winners have been selected for Pharrell, Georgia Tech, and Amazon’s new music coding initiative, “Your Voice is Power.”

Five students were selected from 1,500 applications and were each awarded $5,000 grants to start a business. Five teachers were also “honored for going above and beyond to help their students” with $1,000 cash rewards, according to a statement from Amazon. The students and teachers represent schools from Georgia, Illinois, Florida, California, Texas, and Ontario.

The “Your Voice is Power” competition inspires students to use music as a tool to analyze racial equity, while also learning to code. Amazon and Georgia Tech teamed up with Pharrell’s nonprofit, Yellow, to bring computer science education to students from underserved communities, which are also largely underrepresented in the tech industry too. Through the initiative, students and teachers explored how music, computer science, and entrepreneurship can be advantageous when furthering racial justice.

“Through this wonderful collaboration with Amazon Future Engineer and EarSketch, we are grateful that so many students got to not only experience coding for the first time, but also learned about social justice in an impactful way,” Stacey Lopez, chief operating officer at Yellow, said in a statement. “It is our hope that all students who participated will now share their learned knowledge with others to make changes right in their own communities. The winners’ selections were outstanding, and YELLOW is proud of the dedication from all student and teacher participants.”

The “Your Voice is Power” program encompassed five teaching modules that taught students about coding and music, and included prompts about the significance of racial justice. The spring 2021 program ended with the competition, where students were asked to remix Pharrell’s song “Entrepreneur” using Georgia Tech’s learn-to-code-through-music platform, EarSketch.