Learning to write software has many barriers including learning a complex programming language syntax from documentation and understanding implementation of algorithms.

Troubleshooting bugs in code historically involved searching web forums such as Stack Overflow or programming manuals.

AI large language models offer a new way to write and improve code through plain language instructions such that barriers for beginners to write software have never been lower.

GitHub Copilot Pro is available for free for Students and Faculty at Tulane through GitHub Education:

Sign up using this link:

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/managing-copilot/managing-copilot-as-an-individual-subscriber/managing-your-github-copilot-pro-subscription/getting-free-access-to-copilot-pro-as-a-student-teacher-or-maintainer

An instructional guide walking through signup process in PPT is available at this link:

https://tulane.app.box.com/s/bqsgu0w5ik0c7rvc8txcbuhm1zgwt3ju

In contrast to ChatGPT and Claude which most users interact with by prompting through a chat interface, this AI coding tool is accessed through an integrated development environment (IDE) like Visual Studio Code.

For students a GitHub Education account includes a Student Developer Pack with learning resources and free access to programming-related services. https://education.github.com/pack

For teachers a GitHub Education account includes free access to GitHub Teams and GitHub Classroom, providing resources to teach hands-on programming. https://github.com/education/teachers

Visual Studio Code – An integrated development environment for writing software

Visual Studio Code is an excellent tool for editing scripts and text files and has many installable extensions.

GitHub Copilot Pro is installed as an extension to Visual Studio Code.

Some key features offered GitHub Copilot Pro are automatic inclusion of codebase as context for prompting for generation of new code and integration of edits into existing code, inline code suggestions, easy selection of code snippets for further optimization and adding comments.

A video walkthrough demonstrating usage of GitHub Copilot Pro in Visual Studio Code is available at this link:

https://tulane.app.box.com/s/unolerq02ovrgdqvht5lczz3si56i255