Yes, you made the mesh coarser. Keep in mind there are contact elements not seen in Ansys that add to the count, and that would be why your 115K mesh still wouldn't run. These are only produced as it writes the APDL input file for the solver. You could open the ds.dat in the soluton directory to see these elements, but you have to study the format of the file a bit to understand it.
It appears the Innovation Course examples were not all thoroughly tested to run on the Ansys Student version.
You are navigating away from the AIS Discovery experience