At 1 PM on Monday, June 9, a Grammy-nominated artist will be in concert at Newton Public Library! Earlier this year, librarian Sam Jack interviewed Roy Moye III for a feature in East Wichita News & WestSide Story. Read on to learn more about Moye and his mission to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers – then come to “STEMusic Live!” Kids ages 4+, and their grown-ups, are invited, no registration required.

As a college student at Wichita State University, Roy Moye III had two big passions, in two disparate fields.

One was aerospace engineering, his field of study. Born in Germany to a father serving in the U.S. Army, Moye took his first plane ride at three weeks of age and doesn’t remember a time when he wasn’t enthralled by aviation.

The other was music, especially gospel and R&B. During college, he started to sing in talent shows and showcases, and he started to record himself and put his artistic creations out into the world.

Soon after he earned his degree in 2015, Moye found a way to combine his artistic and scientific pursuits, starting down a path that led to his creation of a STEM education and entertainment company, STEMusic, a few years later. (STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and math.)

“At that time, I was working in the community with an organization called Real Men, Real Heroes, which is now called Heroes Academy,” Moye said. “For about 10 years, I was heavily engaged there, leading fourth- and third-graders as their lead teacher, and meeting every Monday night.

“One of the nights, volunteering, I was asked to do a math activity. I said, ‘Whoa, that seems crazy, because I’m not really friends with math, even though I have a math minor.”

Moye suspected that his kids would not be super into a math activity, either. He needed to get creative.

“These are predominantly young Black boys I was mentoring,” said Moye, who is Black and also has Puerto Rican and Mexican ancestry. “I decided to remix a popular song at the time, which was ‘Watch Me Whip, Watch Me Nae Nae.’ I remixed it as, ‘Watch Me Solve the Equation,’ and that’s how I started the lesson.”

Moye’s performance caused an immediate shift in the energy of the room, with boys racing up to the blackboard to work on math problems.

“I just saw a level of engagement that was inspiring – and I was relieved, because they ended up doing the activity instead of saying no, they didn’t want to do it,” Moye said. “I said to myself, ‘Something happened in that room that was special, and you should do something with it.’”

Moye spent his first six years after college working as a design engineer at Spirit Aerosystems, then shifted to Spirit’s recruitment division, leading the company’s college internship program and focusing on his mission of bringing more people of color into STEM and engineering. 

At the same time, he continued to work on music that would engage kids and spread the gospel of STEM.

In 2019, Moye released STEMusic’s debut, “STEMusic: The EP.” The EP’s title track, “We Call It STEMusic,” still opens Moye’s live shows. It features an engaging beat and a high-impact R&B sound.

“Experiments in the lab, designing to be better than the past. Calculations and equations galore. Code it up, code it up, now it’s in the app store,” Moye sings. “Everywhere we go, people gotta know. We gon’ make it flow: We call it STEMusic.”

Moye soon joined a collective of children’s music artists from all over the country.

“I got some mentors, and I was like, ‘Oh wow, I’m a children’s music artist!’” he said. “That was around the time George Floyd was murdered, so there were a lot of conversations around what this family music collective wanted to do in response to that, for the youth.

“What happened was a spinoff from that more general collective to become 1 Tribe Collective, a collective of Black family and children’s music artists. When that spinoff happened, we got into a conversation over Zoom, all 26 of us, and we decided that we wanted to make an album that speaks to our young Black kids. Talking about justice, yes, but also talking about other topics like playing in the park, STEM concepts, and other things.”

Moye wrote a track for the collective’s debut compilation album, titled “Black Lives Made STEM History,” and hyping inventors and scientists from the Black community. The album was released on June 19, 2021, the first Juneteenth to be declared a federal holiday.

“And a couple of months later, we found out our producers submitted it for the Grammy Awards, and it was nominated for a Grammy for best children’s music album, which was phenomenal,” Moye said. “It was a wild moment. I did not know that creating STEMusic would lead to going to the Grammys and getting that experience in April of 2022.”

Moye’s performing career continued to grow, and in September of last year, he finally left Spirit to make STEMusic his full-time gig. Since then, he has performed for audiences in Chicago, Houston, Kansas City, Phoenix, Atlanta and Wichita, among other locations.

“As I’m speaking to you right now, I’m getting ready to go on a mini-tour to San Diego and Austin,” he said in February. “It’s all exciting, just to continue to spread what STEMusic is all about.”

Moye’s high-energy shows typically last about 45 minutes and include a mix of music and audience-participation activities. The goal is to get kids excited about STEM, and also to raise their awareness that the subjects they study in school are gateways to a profusion of career choices in science, industry and design.

“You’re introducing them to something they’ve never heard of before. Like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that mechanical engineers design cars. I love cars!’ It’s a cool way to open up their world a little bit, and I also think it means something that it comes from someone who looks like them,” Moye said.

During a show he presented in Kansas toward the end of last year, Moye told his young audience that they were going to do a math activity – the “M” in STEM. One boy in the front row was not having it.

“He was like, ‘Boooo!’ There were some people clapping, but he vocally said ‘boo.’ I engaged with him and said, ‘You know what, I actually feel the same way. It’s not my favorite thing, if I’m being honest. But what if we make a deal? What if we do the math song first, and I show you what the math activity is, and you can judge from that,’” Moye recalled.

“The very first line of the song is, ‘Me and math haven’t really been friends, but can I tell you, that’s not where this story ends.’ When I said that line, I said it straight to him. I could see that he felt seen by those lyrics.”

The math song led into a high-energy activity, adding and subtracting using giant dice that the kids tossed around.

“The gym always goes crazy. And this kid, every single problem, he was solving them and yelling the answers, like, ‘It’s 12, it’s 24.’ It really showed me the power of combining STEM and music,” Moye said. “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. It did for me in my life, and it does for boys doing math lessons.”

Moye is currently working on a new album, “STEMusic Takes Flight,” with a focus on the science of flight and airplanes. He feels called to keep doing this kind of work.

“It’s not about trying to be a ‘hero’ or do something incredible. I’m going to keep doing what I’m called to do, which is to stand up for those who may not be able to stand up for themselves. To make sure that the young Black and brown kids grow up knowing that there’s so much opportunity. Sometimes that opportunity has to be fought for, sometimes that opportunity has to be demanded, and what better way to show them that than through my actions and what I’m committed to doing with the power of STEMusic?”

Learn more about Moye and listen to his music on his website, www.TheSTEMusic.com.