I use Visual Studio Code with Jupyter notebooks and Quarto documents for both research and creating educational content. GitHub Copilot Pro is available for free as faculty or students, giving access to the best models for code and content.
Visual Studio Code together with Python, R, and Julia (the languages that I use in Visual Studio Code) takes time and effort to install, especially when using virtual environments. For students just starting out, this might just be too much. Google Colab is a version of Jupyter notebooks that is available right inside of your Google Drive, and you create a notebook the same as creating a Google Doc or a Google Sheet.
I have created a YouTube Playlist with some videos of how to analyze data using Google Colab. In this video series I keep coding to a minimum, instead using the built-in Google Gemini AI to write the code for me.