Pharrell partners with Georgia Tech and Amazon to launch teen coding program

Pharrell partners with Georgia Tech and Amazon to launch teen coding program
Pharrell Williams plays British Summertime Hyde Park, London. (Photo credit: Bang Media)

Pharrell Williams’ education equity nonprofit Yellow, has partnered with the Georgia Institute of Technology and Amazon for a new educational collaboration called Your Voice Is Power. The new program encourages middle and high school students to share their concepts of equity while learning to code new music remixes.


Your Voice is Power is meant to expand the horizons of inner-city youth and introduce kids to careers in computer science while interacting with people of color in the technology fields. The program includes five instruction modules with lesson plans that teach coding while kick-starting meaningful conversations between students and their teachers about the importance of racial justice.


Children selected for the program will get to work closely with prominent professionals such as Pharrell’s engineer Mike Larson, music technologist Chalece DeLaCoudray, and assistant professor of Hip Hop Studies and Digital Media at Georgia Tech Dr. Joycelyn Wilson, among others.

The Your Voice Is Power program concludes with a competition for students to contribute their voices via remixing Pharrell’s new song “Entrepreneur.” Participants are using computer code on Georgia Tech’s learn-to-code-through-music platform, EarSketch.


“This collaboration between YELLOW, Amazon, and Georgia Tech is a celebration of Black creators and change-makers,” Skateboard P explained in a statement. “YELLOW at its core believes that education is a pathway to success. Teaching kids future-ready skills like coding, especially those kids for whom opportunities like this have not been equally distributed, is how we prepare the next generation of entrepreneurs.”

Students in middle and high schools from Canada and the United States are encouraged to apply for the program. Submissions for the first round of the competition are being accepted now until March 12. The second round of competition will run from March 15 through June 4.

The remixes will be judged by a panel of Amazon engineers, Amazon Music team members, and music industry professionals.

For more information on “Your Voice Is Power,” visit www.amazonfutureengineer.com/YourVoiceIsPower.

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