Amazon Web Services is expanding its Kiro Students program worldwide, giving university students free access to its artificial intelligence-powered development tool Kiro for one year.
The program is designed to help students turn ideas into working projects with AI development tools and to experience "agentic development," in which software is built in collaboration with AI agents. AWS said on the 11th that it is sharply expanding the program by adding 121 universities in 16 countries, after first running it in March at 11 universities in two countries.
The expansion brings the total to 132 universities across 18 countries. In South Korea, Seoul National University, Yonsei University and Kookmin University have been newly added. Students at those schools can use Kiro Pro, AWS's paid development tool, free for 12 months. Kiro Pro provides 1,000 credits a month, a package worth $240 a year per user.
Students can create a Kiro account with a university email address or link one to an existing account, then verify their enrollment through the student verification service SheerID. Once verified, they can use the Kiro integrated development environment, or IDE, the command-line interface, Kiro Web and Kiro Crew for coursework and personal projects.
The Kiro IDE supports spec-driven development, an approach in which an idea is first broken down into specific requirements, a design plan and a step-by-step task list before coding begins. Students can use it to build tools such as a scheduling assistant for study groups, a flashcard app that turns lecture notes into quizzes, or a service based on a startup idea. When working on several projects at once, the Agent Focus feature runs tasks in parallel and gathers the results in one place.
The Kiro CLI offers scripting and task automation using AI agents in a command-line environment. Students can automate jobs such as organizing lecture recordings, backing up projects to GitHub every night or converting a syllabus into calendar entries. Tests can also be run automatically before code is committed. Through SSH, Kiro can be used on university lab computers or remote clusters.
Kiro Web runs in a browser without any software installation. Students can start projects on lab computers, borrowed laptops or Chromebooks, and use it to build club landing pages, browser games for hackathons or prototypes of startup ideas to show co-founders.
Kiro Crew, offered as open source, lets students configure tools and agents to match how they work. It can run tasks in the background, such as sending a morning reminder of unanswered emails or pulling the latest changes to a project before class, and can be set up to work on multiple features in parallel during hackathons.
AWS said it is broadening students' access to professional development tools while they are still in school, given that AI agents are becoming standard in software development. The company said it widened the program's reach to give talented students the same learning opportunities regardless of country or region. Using Kiro, students learn agent-based development by describing desired outcomes to AI, breaking complex problems into smaller tasks and making key decisions themselves, such as choosing the right tool for each situation.
