Calgary students learn coding through Indigenous music at Your Voice is Power workshop

Combining teaching tech and social justice issues Calgary junior high school students are learning valuable computer science and coding skills through Indigenous music.

Hundreds of Calgary junior high school students took part in a workshop Tuesday that teaches computer science and coding skills through Indigenous music.

"Your Voice is Power" is a charitable initiative by TakingITGlobal, in partnership with Amazon Future Engineer and Amazon Music.

It allows students to remix music from Indigenous artists through a free online code editor, EarSketch.

The program also engages youth in conversations about First Nations, Inuit and Métis experiences, including topics such as residential schools, the Sixties Scoop and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's 94 Calls to Action.

"I think it's really a unique experience. ... You wouldn't think that coding music and social justice would go so beautifully together, but they create a meaningful message," said Marika Schalla, an Indigenous educator who helped develop the curriculum.

"Using these coding skills and these technical skills, students learn valuable and meaningful teachings they can use in the future because they are our future leaders.

"They're going to be going out into the community prepared and know that it is possible to have a job in computer science or STEM, even if you're an Indigenous kid from the reserve."

Indigenous hip-hop artist Dakota Bear, whose music is featured in the curriculum, says it's very important to him to fuse music and technology together while giving both Indigenous and non-Indigenous children the opportunity to learn new skills and be more aware of their community.

He played his award-winning song, "Freedom", which speaks to discrimination and prejudices toward Canada's Indigenous community and highlights awareness around the importance of available drinking water and various climate change challenges.

"It's really empowering to me because when I was a youth, I never got that information. I never had these kinds of presentations," Bear said.

"Music is a universal language. It's a vibrational frequency. It's that feeling it evokes, that emotion. So music, being that universal language, also connects us on a different level as human beings.

"When you have music and use that with the message, it just becomes so much more impactful."

Grade 9 student Peyton Iwaniuk, who attended the workshop, says she learned a lot about how to separate different pieces of music into code and was moved by the message that came with it.

"These are injustices and it's not fair to hear about people being discriminated against or having these awful things said or done to them because of their ethnic origin," she said.

“It should really be something to embrace instead of something to beat down on.

"This program is so important because it's a way to expand to the world and to other people through technology to prevent this from happening in the future."

Tuesday's hackathon coding event held at the University of Calgary's downtown campus is one of several day-long workshops that have now helped teach thousands of kids across Western Canada.