How do I instal plugin into theme?

Very new to wordpress and I’m trying to figure out how to instal Slide Deck at the top of my front-page, so it stays as a static element. I understand that to do this I have to put the shortcode into the theme. How do I do this? Do I put it into the main theme or the child theme I’ve created, and where exactly do I put it? The instructions the plugin developer gives are as follows:

You can also place a SlideDeck in your template or theme via the PHP command slidedeck(); Just pass the ID of the SlideDeck you want to render and an associative array of the styles you want to apply to the SlideDeck itself. For example:

<?php slidedeck(12,array('width'=>'100%','height'=>'300px')); ?>
Where 12 is the SlideDeck’s ID. You can also see this code snippet in the sidebar of the SlideDeck editing interface.

Does this mean I create a php file called SlideDeck.php in my child theme and stick in the short code? How do I determine where exactly on my front page the slider will appear?

Would appreciate any guidance or step-by-step instructions easy for wordpress novice to grasp. Thanks in advance.