AI Tools Guide for SCU Students

This category is about the assistant you talk to: asking questions, drafting, explaining, thinking out loud. The agentic versions of these same three products are in section 2.

What it does: Google's AI assistant. Ask questions, draft and edit text, summarize documents, work through problems, and generate images. Sign in at gemini.google.com with your SCU account.

Why it's the top pick: Because SCU already pays for it, and for ordinary chat it is genuinely good enough. Paying $20/mo for a marginally better chatbot is the most common way students waste money on AI. Gemini through your SCU account gets you three things the free consumer tiers do not: the campus data agreement (your prompts are not human-reviewed and not used to train Google's models), image generation included, and integration in Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Gmail, where much of your coursework already lives.

Student access: Free, no signup beyond your SCU login. Gemini Notebook (see section 5) comes with the same agreement and is the better tool when you are working from your own sources.

Limitations: Most SCU users are capped at roughly 1,000 queries per month, shared across chat and image generation. More importantly, it is chat only. There is no harness, and Google's agentic tooling is not provisioned through SCU accounts, which is what section 2 is about.

No credit card required. Use your SCU Google account.

The same vendors as section 1, in their agentic form: given a folder and a goal, these tools act on their own. See Two Modes if that distinction is new to you. SCU provides nothing in this category.

If you pay for one AI tool, buy a model with a harness

What it does: Claude Pro turns the Claude app into a harness. Two products matter most here, and they cover different people:

• Claude Cowork is the version with a normal graphical interface, built for people who do not live in a terminal. Point it at a folder, describe multi-step work in plain language, and it reads, creates, and edits files on its own in a sandboxed environment. Available on macOS and Windows through the Claude desktop app since April 2026. If you are not a programmer, this is the easiest way into agentic AI, and it is aimed at research, writing, and course prep rather than code.
• Claude Code is the terminal version, and the current industry standard for agentic coding. Give it a task in plain language and it reads your codebase, edits files, runs tests, and commits. Strongest on multi-file refactors, debugging, and building features across a whole project.

The same subscription also includes Claude Design (visual and slide work) and Claude Science.

Why it's the top pick: It is the most complete harness lineup available to a student, and the only one that seriously covers non-coding work. Claude Cowork in particular has no real equivalent at any other vendor: every competing harness assumes you are a developer. For a campus where most people are not, that matters more than benchmark scores.

Student access: Changed Claude Code and Claude Cowork are no longer on the free tier; both require Pro, at $20/mo monthly or $17/mo billed annually. Anthropic runs Claude for Education, which gives free access to everyone at participating universities, but SCU is not a participant as of September 2026, and there is no individual student discount.

Limitations: It costs money, and that is the honest catch: this is the one category in this guide where the best answer is not free. All the harness products draw from the same usage pool as chat, so a heavy session eats your allowance.

What it does: Google's agentic development platform, and the umbrella for its developer AI tooling. An editor built around agents rather than autocomplete: describe an outcome, and agents plan the work, edit files across your project, run commands, and report back on what they changed. Multiple models supported, with Gemini 3 Pro as the default.

Why we recommend it: It is the most capable harness a student can use without paying anything, and it is a real one rather than a limited trial. Cross-platform on macOS, Windows, and Linux, with generous rate limits on a frontier model. If money is the constraint, start here and do not feel you are getting a toy.

Student access: Free with a personal Google account. Antigravity is not provisioned through SCU accounts and Workspace sign-in is inconsistent, so use a personal Google account. Claiming the free 12-month Google AI Pro student offer (see section 4) raises your Antigravity rate limits.

Limitations: Moving fast, so expect rough edges and shifting limits. It is developer-shaped: unlike Claude Cowork, it assumes you are working on code. Changed Google retired the standalone Gemini CLI for individuals on June 18, 2026 and folded it into Antigravity CLI, so older tutorials are out of date.

No credit card required.

What it does: Industry-standard design tool for UI/UX, prototyping, and collaboration. The AI features include Figma Make (generates working UI from text prompts), Figma Sites, auto-layout suggestions, and AI-powered asset search.

Student access: Higher education students still get the full Professional plan free, verified via figma.com/education. This includes 3,000 AI credits per month, unlimited files, design systems, branching, FigJam, and collaboration features. This is one of the few student offers in this guide that has not been cut back in 2026.

Limitations: AI credits are capped at 3,000 per month and Figma Make is credit-hungry, so plan on roughly 50 to 70 Make prompts rather than unlimited generation. Some AI features, including the Figma AI Agent during its beta, are unavailable on Education. K-12 students do not get Figma AI tools at all.

No credit card required.

What it does: Google's image generation models, marketed as Nano Banana, generate and edit images directly inside Gemini. Highly realistic output, unusually good text rendering inside images, inpainting and style transfer, upscaling, and the ability to use live web search to inform what it draws.

SCU student access: Sign in at gemini.google.com with your SCU account and image generation works normally, covered by the campus data agreement. SCU's own faculty library guide confirms image generation is part of the campus subscription. (The student-facing library page still carries an older note saying otherwise. Disregard it.)

If you need more volume: eligible U.S. college students aged 18 and over can claim a free 12-month Google AI Pro subscription, announced August 19, 2026 and redeemable through December 31, 2026 at gemini.google/students. It adds expanded generation limits along with Deep Research, expanded Gemini Notebook, and 5 TB of storage. You verify with your SCU email through SheerID, but the subscription itself has to sit on a personal Google account; Google explicitly excludes school-issued accounts from this offer.

Watch the renewal. The student offer requires a valid payment method at sign-up and auto-renews at $19.99/mo when the free year ends. Put a calendar reminder on the expiration date.

Limitations: Generation volume depends on your tier, and your SCU account's roughly 1,000 monthly queries are shared across chat and image generation. If the student offer does not fit your situation, Google AI Plus is a cheaper paid alternative with limited Nano Banana access.

What it does: Upload PDFs, Google Docs, websites, YouTube videos, and other sources, then ask questions across all of them at once. It synthesizes, summarizes, finds connections, builds mind maps and flashcards, and generates audio and video overviews of your material. Because it answers only from your sources, it hallucinates far less than open-web chat.

Why it's the top pick: Changed We moved this above Deep Research because it is the strongest research tool SCU actually provides. Sign in at notebooklm.google.com with your SCU account and it is covered by the campus data agreement. For literature reviews, seminar reading, and lecture notes, that combination of free, private, and genuinely good is hard to beat. Note the rename: NotebookLM is now Gemini Notebook, and both names are still in circulation.

Free tier limits: 100 notebooks, 50 sources per notebook, 50 chat queries per day, 3 audio overviews and 3 video overviews per day, and 10 deep research queries per month. Each source can hold up to 500,000 words.

No credit card required. Use your SCU Google account.

What it does: A cloud-based Jupyter notebook environment where you write and run Python with AI assistance. Gemini is built in to generate code, explain errors, and suggest analyses. Upload CSVs, connect to Google Sheets, create charts, run statistical analyses, and train models, all in the browser with no installation.

Free tier: Generous, with Gemini-powered code assistance, unlimited notebooks, and free GPU access (typically T4). Google does not publish a fixed GPU quota; in practice free users see roughly 15 to 30 GPU hours per week, and availability shifts with demand.

Limitations: Requires some Python comfort, though Gemini closes much of that gap. Sessions time out when idle and a free notebook runs for at most 12 hours. Neither a GPU nor a specific GPU model is guaranteed. Note also that this is close to harness mode inside a notebook, but it cannot touch files outside the notebook environment.

No credit card required.

What it does: AI-powered presentation, document, and website builder. Describe your topic and Gamma generates a full deck with content, layout, and visuals. Exports to PowerPoint, PDF, PNG, and Google Slides. Real-time collaboration included.

Free tier: 400 one-time AI credits, roughly 10 full presentations, and up to 10 cards per generation. Credits do not refresh. Gamma branding appears on free presentations.

Limitations: The one-time credit grant is the real constraint; once it is spent, it is spent. Changed Paid plans are now Plus at $9/seat/mo (1,000 monthly credits) and Pro at $18/seat/mo (4,000 monthly credits). No student discount.

No credit card required.

What it does: AI-powered app builder. Describe what you want in plain language and Bolt generates a full-stack web application, deploys it, and lets you iterate by conversation. Databases, hosting, and deployment are handled for you.

Free tier: 1 million tokens per month with a 300,000 token daily cap. Includes public and private projects, website hosting, unlimited databases, and up to 333,000 web requests. This tier is unchanged since our last update, which is unusual in this category.

Limitations: Bolt branding on deployed sites, no custom domains, 10 MB file upload limit. Fine for learning and prototyping, not for production. Changed Pro is now $25/mo.

No credit card required.