As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes an integral part of the everyday lives of most Americans, more companies are introducing new tools to educate our youth on how to use AI responsibly and productively. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of these companies helping K-12 students and educators alike step into the future. Most recently, they have signed onto the White House’s “Pledge to America’s Youth: Investing in AI Education,” and have also offered ongoing support for the Presidential AI Challenge.
AWS highlights several major areas where AI is being used to address real-world challenges and improve student outcomes, including “personalizing the student learning journey,” “enhancing teacher effectiveness and productivity,” “early identification of at-risk students” and “enhancing accessibility and special education support.”
As a part of the Pledge to America’s Youth, AWS plans to “support AI skills training for 4 million learners and provide curricula for 10,000 educators by 2028,” as well as provide “$30 million in AWS promotional credits to help organizations create educational solutions.” These AI-powered solutions range from chatbots and teaching assistants to lesson plan generators to improve educational access for underserved learners globally. They have also partnered with PlayLabAI, creating a $500,000 fund to sponsor selected school districts for the 2025-2026 school year, assisting with “professional development for educators on AI fundamentals, classroom-ready AI tools, and curriculum resources.”
In conjunction with these broader efforts, AWS is directly contributing to the Presidential AI Challenge by:
- “Offering educators access to PartyRock, an Amazon Bedrock Playground that is a fast and fun platform for building AI-generated apps,”
- “Awarding student winners with $1.5 million in cash prizes,”
- Providing the national winner’s school district with “$50,000 in Amazon cloud credits (up to $200,000 total) to support their solution build on Amazon, helping bring their innovative ideas to life,” and
- Offering technical expert guidance for educators throughout the process through AWS office hours, live webinars and an extensive resource library.
Previously, AWS partnered with the Council of the Great City Schools and the Consortium for School Networking to develop the K-12 Generative AI Readiness Checklist Questionnaire, a guide for school districts on implementing these tools effectively in their classrooms. Building on this, AWS’ K12 Generative AI Maturity Readiness Assessment helps school districts thoughtfully deploy the technology for improved learning outcomes. According to AWS, the three levels of maturity under this assessment’s rubric are:
- Emerging: An organization is in the initial stages of AI adoption. Awareness of AI and its potential is limited, and there are minimal dedicated resources or infrastructure for AI initiatives.
- Developing: The organization has a moderate understanding of AI and its applications. There is a growing investment in AI infrastructure and resources. Policies and governance structures for AI are taking shape, and there is an increasing focus on staff training in AI…Efforts towards systematic evaluation and deployment, and continuous improvement of AI initiatives are evident.
- Mature: The organization demonstrates a deep understanding and expertise in AI. There is significant investment in advanced AI infrastructure and resources…Staff exhibit a high level of AI proficiency, supported by a culture of continuous learning…There is a strong commitment to ongoing evaluation, adaptation and improvement in AI usage.
Furthermore, AWS can serve as a solid foundation and infrastructure to help schools easily integrate AI, with its solutions architects able to assist “whether you want to build your own solution, need support throughout the process, or prefer a prebuilt offering from AWS Partners.” Their generative AI offerings include applications like Amazon Bedrock, a service that allows users to access leading third-party and AWS foundation models (FMs) for building and scaling generative AI applications, and Amazon Q, a generative AI assistant that can accelerate software development and utilize internal data to streamline operations.
Using AWS generative AI services, many schools and education companies have been able to leverage the systems to advance learning outcomes. One example of this is the company’s partnership with Code.org to create Dance Party: AI Edition, an activity designed to help K-12 students get an introductory, hands-on experience with coding and generative AI in a safe and creative environment. Another is BriBooks, and their creative writing assistant, built on AWS, “BriBoo.” The organization runs large events that bring children and parents together to write stories where the BriBoo model can “provide focused recommendations based on an author’s age group, genre of book, and style of writing on their platform.”
Lastly, AWS also offers broad generative AI courses for all skill levels, on which educators can be trained early. This includes an Immersion Workshop on AWS AI/ML Basics for EdTech and GovTech, an industry-specific training for consumers before implementing the tools into their workflow and curriculum.
America’s education system needs the continued innovation and positive adoption of AI to improve outcomes. Policymakers and educators must keep benefits like this in mind while addressing the risks to continue enabling the children of today to flourish in an evolving society.