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COSC 10001: Student Tool Setup

Everything here is free. None of it requires a credit card.

⏰ Start GitHub Student Pack verification on day one, before you leave the classroom.

It is not instant: it can take several days. Almost everything else in this list waits on it.

What you need, and in what order

# Thing When Why
1 GitHub account First week Everything else hangs off this
2 GitHub Student Developer Pack First week Unlocks Copilot and ~20 other tools
3 GitHub Copilot Student plan First week Your primary coding agent
4 IntelliJ IDEA, and the karel-starter project Before Wed, Sep 2 The editor for this course. It installs Java for you
5 A terminal, Git, and Node.js Before Wed, Sep 9 Where the rest of the work happens
6 GitHub Copilot CLI Before Wed, Sep 23 Your agent, in the terminal
7 ChatGPT free account + Codex CLI Before Wed, Sep 23 Your second agent, for comparison

🐢 Only rows 1 to 4 matter this week.

Row 4 is a download bar and a few dialog boxes, and it is the whole of your homework for Wed, Sep 2. Rows 5 through 7 have their own weeks and their own pages, and nothing is gained by racing ahead to them.

All of it is free, and the Schedule has the dates.

1. GitHub account

Sign up at https://github.com.

Choose your username carefully. This is a professional identity you'll carry into job applications: bwei or bingyangwei, not xX_c0d3lord_Xx. Changing it later breaks every link anyone has to your work.

Use whichever email you'll keep after graduation as the primary, and add your @tcu.edu address as a secondary: verification needs it.

2. GitHub Student Developer Pack

Apply at https://education.github.com/pack. You'll need:

  • Your @tcu.edu email, added and verified on your GitHub account
  • Proof of enrollment: a dated class schedule from my.tcu.edu works well
  • A real name and profile photo on the account, since sparse accounts get rejected more often

If you get rejected, it is almost always one of these three, and all three are on your end:

  • The Name field on your GitHub profile isn't your full legal name exactly as it appears on the document you uploaded. A nickname fails.
  • Your billing address in GitHub settings is empty. Fill it in with your real address.
  • The document doesn't clearly show a date in the current academic year. A class schedule printed from my.tcu.edu with the term visible works; a student ID card with no date usually doesn't.

Fix those and reapply. I cannot verify you manually. GitHub does not do manual reviews at an instructor's request, so there is no back channel for me to push you through, and I'd rather tell you that than have you wait on me. What I can do is look at the rejection with you and write you a dated enrollment letter if your class schedule isn't doing the job. Bring the rejection email to office hours.

Besides Copilot, the Pack unlocks JetBrains IDEs, cloud credits, free domain names, and a couple dozen other tools. Worth browsing once it lands.

3. GitHub Copilot Student: your primary agent

Once the Pack is approved, the Copilot Student plan attaches to your account automatically: unlimited code completions, 200 AI credits per month for chat and agent mode, automatic model selection, and Copilot CLI.

Two hundred credits is genuinely enough for this course; every assignment is sized to fit. But it's a budget, and working inside one is part of the job:

  • Completions don't cost credits. Only chat and agent-mode requests do.
  • One well-specified request beats five vague ones. "Add error handling" costs the same as "Add a try/except around the file read in main.py that prints a clear message when the file is missing", and only one of them works the first time.
  • Check your usage in GitHub Settings → Copilot before the end of the month, not after.
  • Credits reset monthly. Don't hoard them, and don't burn a month's worth on the first weekend.

In this course you drive it from the terminal, with Copilot CLI. Editor plugins exist for IntelliJ and for VS Code, but no assignment here needs one.

Nothing to install yet. Copilot CLI needs a terminal and Node.js, which are step 5 and are due before Wed, Sep 9. Get the Pack approved now; install the agent later.

4. IntelliJ IDEA, and Karel

This is your homework for Wed, Sep 2, and it is the only thing on the list.

Download IntelliJ from https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/, then open the karel-starter project inside it. Both halves, step by step and with every dialog named, are on their own page: IntelliJ + Karel.

You do not have to install Java yourself. Java comes as something called a JDK, and putting one on a laptop by hand is the classic way a first week goes sideways: a JRE instead of a JDK, a wrong PATH, javac mysteriously silent. IntelliJ downloads a JDK for you from a dialog box, and the guide says exactly which one to pick. This is the main reason this course uses IntelliJ.

It will not disturb Intro to Programming. The JDK IntelliJ fetches lives in a folder of its own and is used by IntelliJ alone, so whatever Java that course has you install is untouched by it. If the two courses' instructions ever seem to disagree, Intro to Programming wins, and nothing on this page is asking you to change anything over there.

Yes, this is a different editor from your programming class, which uses VS Code. That's on purpose and it is not extra work. Both drive the same javac underneath, you'll watch that happen on the projector, and being able to sit down in front of two editors instead of one is a small, real advantage. IntelliJ is free, and no assignment in this course needs a paid version of anything.

What Karel is: a robot in a grid who understands four commands: move(), turnLeft(), pickBeeper(), putBeeper(). That's the entire language. We use it because it's small enough to learn in ten minutes, and because when your program is wrong you see the robot walk into a wall instead of reading a stack trace.

Read chapters 1–2 of Stanford's Karel reader as well. Free, short, and written for people who have never programmed.

If it doesn't work, come to class with it broken. That is genuinely the assignment: the session is built around fixing exactly this, and you'll understand why it broke in a way you wouldn't have if it had just worked. Bring the exact error message.

5. A terminal, Git, and Node.js

Not this week. This one is due before the Git session on Wed, Sep 9, and there's nothing to gain by doing it early.

Follow the guide for your machine, on your own time. We do not install anything in class: fifty minutes a week does not stretch to a room of people downloading the same files, and class time is for fixing what broke.

Your machine Guide
Windows Terminal setup on Windows
macOS Terminal setup on macOS

The required part of each guide is short: you already have a terminal, so it's Git, Node.js, and the two AI agents. Everything past that is marked optional, makes things prettier, and is not needed for any assignment here. Skip it in week one and come back when you're curious.

Both guides end with a block that prints the version of every tool. Five lines, five versions, and you're done. If any of them error, bring your laptop to class or office hours. Don't quietly stay broken.

Optional, not graded: MIT's The Missing Semester is a short free course on the shell, Git, and debugging: the things every CS program assumes you know and never teaches. The first three lectures cover our first two sessions in more depth, at your own pace.

6. Copilot CLI: your agent in the terminal

Once the Pack is approved and you have a terminal from step 5, this is one line. Both terminal guides include it, and it needs to work by Wed, Sep 23.

npm install -g @github/copilot

Then run copilot inside a project folder and it walks you through signing in.

7. Codex CLI: your second agent

You'll run the same task through two different tools and compare what comes back. You can't see an agent's failure modes until you have something to compare it against.

  1. Create a free account at https://chatgpt.com
  2. Install and verify it (Node.js required, from step 5):
npm install -g @openai/codex
codex --version
  1. Run codex inside a project folder.

Free tier: roughly 10 tasks per day on a rolling window, with a weekly cap. That's deliberately enough for the comparison exercise and not enough to build a whole project on. Use Copilot for building, Codex for comparing.

Optional: Claude Code

I demo Claude Code in class most weeks. You are not required to have it and no assignment needs it.

Claude Builder Club is the good route: Anthropic runs a campus program at https://claude.com/programs/campus with student-led chapters that run hackathons and host workshops. Chapters have reported providing members with Claude Pro access and monthly API credits, and the organizer role carries a stipend. If you want to start or join a TCU chapter, talk to me or a peer mentor. It costs nothing, it's a genuinely good leadership item for a first-year résumé, and it would bring speakers to campus for the whole department.

Paying for it yourself: Claude Pro is about $20/month. Don't buy it for this course. Nothing you're graded on requires it, and I'd rather you spent the money on a domain name for your Ship-It project. If you do have it: npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code.

Why we're not standardizing on one tool

This course requires two agents and demos a third. That's intentional: the skill that transfers is the loop, not the vendor.

prompt → plan → read the diff → verify → commit

Copilot agent mode, Codex, and Claude Code all run that loop with different interfaces. In four years you'll be using something that doesn't exist yet, and what you'll carry into it is the loop and the judgment, not the keyboard shortcuts.

There's also an honest reason: institutional access to the premium tools costs roughly $240 per student per year. The department can't fund that, and I'm not going to build a course where students who can pay $20/month do better than students who can't. So the required stack is free, permanently, for all of you.

Troubleshooting

Student Pack rejected twice → check the three things in section 2, then bring the rejection email to office hours. I can write you a dated enrollment letter; I can't verify your account for you, and nobody at TCU can.

Pack approved but Copilot still shows Free → sign out of GitHub completely and back in. It can take up to 24 hours to propagate; after that, check https://github.com/settings/copilot.

command not found after installing something → the tool installed fine, but your shell doesn't know where to look yet. Close the terminal completely and reopen it. This fixes it about 90% of the time.

Out of Copilot credits mid-month → tell me. Then fall back to Codex, which is on its own free tier, and to Copilot completions, which don't consume credits at all.

Everything is broken and I don't know where to start → bring the laptop to office hours. It's a normal thing to do and takes about ten minutes. Staying broken for three weeks is the thing that hurts you.

First-week checklist

  • GitHub account created, with a professional username
  • @tcu.edu email added and verified on GitHub
  • Student Developer Pack application submitted
  • Joined the class Slack
  • Day 1 survey completed

Those five are non-negotiable. Then, before Wed, Sep 2, three more and no others:

That is the whole list. There is no terminal step this week, and nothing here asks you to install Java by hand.

Then, before Wed, Sep 9:

Attempted, not necessarily working. Coming to class with a broken install is the assignment. Coming with an untouched one is not.