Amazon Music: Careers Behind the Beats

On the tour, you will learn how songs are recorded in the studio, how streaming services license content from record labels, and how engineers and professionals around the world collaborate to build or enhance apps, like Amazon Music, to listen to our favorite songs. Along the way they’ll meet a music producer, mastering engineer, lawyer, project manager, product manager, UX designer, front end engineer, principle engineer, and software development engineer.

To learn more, check out the teacher toolkit resources.

Careers Behind the Beats is aligned to the following CSTA standards:

• 1B-IC-18 Discuss computing technologies that have changed the world, and express how those technologies influence, and are influenced by, cultural practices.
• 1B-IC-21 Use public domain or creative commons media, and refrain from copying or using material created by others without permission.
• 1B-AP-08 Compare and refine multiple algorithms for the same task and determine which is the most appropriate.
• 1B-AP-10 Create programs that include sequences, events, loops, and conditionals.
  1B-AP-12 Modify, remix, or incorporate portions of an existing program into one’s own work, to develop something new or add more advanced features.
• 1B-AP-13 Use an iterative process to plan the development of a program by including others’ perspectives and considering user preferences.
• 1B-AP-16 Take on varying roles, with teacher guidance, when collaborating with peers during the design, implementation, and review stages of program development.
• 1B-CS-02 Hardware + software work together as a system to accomplish tasks.
• 2-CS-02 Design projects that combine hardware and software components to collect and exchange data. Collecting and exchanging data involves input, output, storage, and processing.
• 2-AP-10 Use flowcharts and/or pseudocode to address complex problems as algorithms.
• 2-AP-18 Distribute tasks and maintain a project timeline when collaboratively developing computational artifacts.

The tour is aligned to the following disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts, and science and engineering practices:

• Crosscutting Concept: Cause and Effect Events have causes, sometimes simple, sometimes multifaceted.
• Crosscutting Concept: Systems and System Models A system is an organized group of related objects or components; models can be used for understanding and predicting the behavior of systems.
• Crosscutting Concept: Energy and Matter Tracking energy and matter flows, into, out of, and within systems helps one understand their system’s behavior.
• Analyze and Interpret Data
• 3-5-ETS1-1 Engineering Design Define a simple design problem reflecting a need or a want that includes specified criteria for success and constraints on materials, time, or cost.
• HS-ETS1-3 Evaluate a solution to a complex real-world problem based on prioritized criteria and trade-offs that account for a range of constraints, including cost, safety, reliability, and aesthetics as well as possible social, cultural, and environmental impacts.
• 4-PS4-1 Waves and Their Applications in Tech for Information Transfer Develop a model of waves to describe patterns in terms of amplitude and wavelength and that waves can cause objects to move.
• HS-PS4-5 Communicate technical information about how some technological devices use the principles of wave behavior and wave interactions with matter to transmit and capture information and energy.

The following STEM topics will be introduced and explained in real-life context during the tour: hardware, software, systems, inputs, outputs, sound energy, amplitude, wavelength, export, copyright, licensing, streaming, front end, back end, User Experience (UX), specifications, ingestion, data, and machine learning.

See the Teacher Toolkit to learn more.

The Amazon Music: Careers Behind the Beats Tour is designed to take 45 minutes (1 class period). The tour is also available in split parts if you do not have 45 minutes available.

We recommend the tour for any grade 4 and above. The tour includes content accessible to each grade and teachers can use the Teacher Toolkit to adjust learning how they see fit.

If you teach a grade below 4th, please preview the tour to determine fit with your students.

The tour, and all materials included in the accompanying Teacher Toolkit, are provided to teachers at no cost. You do not need a paid Kahoot! account to take the tour - sign up for a free teacher account on Kahoot! or utilize the solo play links on our website to play completely free.

We do not collect personal student information on either tour. If a teacher does have a Kahoot! accounts, they can assign the tour to their students to track their students’ progress, but individuals’ information is not shared with Amazon. During the tour, students will answer poll questions about their intent to persist in careers in STEM and their overall satisfaction with the tour. These questions are multiple choice and do not collect any PII from students.

Yes, absolutely. Students can also play the Kahoot! version of the tour on their own.

We apologize for the inconvenience. Videos are embedded from YouTube, and if blocked by a firewall, will appear as black screens or not play. If your school has YouTube blocked, please have them whitelist the links to each video in the tour.

Please reach out to afe-contact@amazon.com for any questions.