2) Exchange with this friend your machine's IP addresses (get these using ifconfig).
3) From your machine, ssh into their machine using the student account.
4) On your machine, create a text file of some sort (it does not matter what it contains). Transfer this file to the remote machine and verify via ssh that it is there.
5) Create a directory structure on the remote users machine. Fill that structure with text files (it could just be the text file created above, but copied and name differently several times). Use scp to recursively transfer that directory back to your machine and verify that the transfer worked.