Your Voice is Power: Integrating Computing, Music, Entrepreneurship, and Social Justice Learning.

Computational thinking has become pervasive across many technical and creative disciplines. Creating a computationally literate workforce capable of recognizing and eliminating algorithmic discrimination requires diverse perspectives and lived experiences. Your Voice is Power is a 5-class period curriculum targeted for K-12 audiences that seeks to promote racial equity and increase interest in computing careers by integrating elements of computing, music, social justice, and entrepreneurship. Centering around the song "Entrepreneur" by Pharrell Williams, students engage in lyrical analysis to extract and explore themes of social justice using the OUTKAST Imagination framework. Students then engage with musical concepts from a computing perspective and implement them using EarSketch, a web-based, learn-to-code through music remixing platform developed at Georgia Tech. In this paper, we present a description of the Your Voice is Power Curriculum and results from an evaluation study. The curriculum overview includes a description of the content and activities, as well as a discussion of the frameworks and theories underlying the curriculum's development. We also present results from a program evaluation covering both a pilot and a full implementation of this newly developed curriculum during the 2020-2021 academic year. Participating high school students and teachers were recruited to respond to online surveys regarding their awareness of and interest in computing, music, and social justice, and their experiences in the competition. Teachers felt that competition participation conferred a variety of benefits to their students and expressed positive attitudes around the social justice focus of the curriculum. Students provided largely positive feedback on the competition and reported a positive impact on their understanding of social justice and equity. Students also demonstrated high levels of understanding of the ubiquity of coding skills and applications. Taken together, program evaluation results show that this integration of themes is effective in engaging students in difficult conversations about race while building interest in computing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]