Sun Devils gain access to Kiro’s new AI developer tool
Arizona State University students and faculty now can add another professional-grade artificial intelligence-powered technology to their growing toolsets. Kiro provides an agentic coding assistant powered by AI that helps developers build software faster and with fewer mistakes.
ASU is one of 11 universities nationwide where faculty and students can receive no-cost access to Kiro for one year, alongside California Polytechnic State University, Carnegie Mellon University and Georgia Institute of Technology, among others. The free access includes 1,000 credits per month.
The Kiro Integrated Development Environment (IDE) empowers students to build career-ready skills through work with AI agents, which are quickly becoming part of the standard software engineering toolkit. The Kiro Student Tier provides students the same caliber of tooling that professional software engineering teams use every day, thus eliminating a learning curve once students enter the workforce.
While most AI coding tools are great at generating code from prompts, Kiro both generates code and brings structure to the process through spec-driven development. Users can simply describe what they want and Kiro breaks it down into clear requirements, designs and sequenced tasks.
This week, ASU and Kiro are collaborating to offer three free Kiro training sessions led by Aditya Challa, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) senior solutions architect.
ASU students are invited to register for one of the following virtual sessions, hosted on Zoom:
· Monday, April 6 from 1:00 - 3:00 p.m. MST
· Tuesday, April 8 from 4:00 - 6:00 p.m. MST
· Friday, April 10 from 9:00 - 11:00 a.m. MST
Sign up for a virtual Kiro workshop
Leading up to the Kiro Spark Challenge
The workshops will culminate in the Kiro Spark Challenge hosted by ASU Enterprise Technology on Friday, April 24 and sponsored by Toptal. During the one-day design challenge, held at the Sun Devil Fitness Complex, students will work in three-member interdisciplinary teams to design an application in just 24 hours using Kiro. They will tackle a challenge revealed at the start of the event.
On hand will be mentors included teams from AWS, Kiro and Toptal, the world’s largest fully remote workforce.
Applicants should apply before April 17 to be matched with other participants based on experience and interests.
A longstanding strategic collaboration
The workshops and Kiro Spark Challenge build on a longstanding strategic collaboration between ASU and AWS — the ASU AI Cloud Innovation Center (AI-CIC). Today, the AI-CIC is focused on AI innovation in the public sector, preparing students and organizations for a tech-driven workforce. See below for AI-CIC impact stories.
AWS is also the top sponsor for ASU’s second annual global summit, Agentic AI and the Student Experience, taking place in Tempe, Arizona from October 20-22, 2026.