Explain the programming steps necessary to make a class's member variable static.

First, create a class. In this example, we will use a simple class called 'Student'. ```cpp class Student { int studentID; }; ```

Declare a member variable within the class. For this example, we will declare an integer variable called 'totalStudents' that will store the total number of students. ```cpp class Student { int studentID; int totalStudents; }; ```

To make the member variable 'totalStudents' static, simply add the 'static' keyword before the variable declaration. ```cpp class Student { int studentID; static int totalStudents; }; ```

In most programming languages, static member variables are required to be initialized outside the class because they have only one copy in the memory shared by all instances. To initialize the static variable 'totalStudents', we must do it outside the class by adding the following line of code below the class definition. ```cpp int Student::totalStudents = 0; ``` This initializes the 'totalStudents' static variable with a value of 0. The full code should look like this: ```cpp class Student { int studentID; static int totalStudents; }; int Student::totalStudents = 0; ``` Now, the 'totalStudents' variable can be used as a static member variable within the 'Student' class. All instances of the class will share its value, and you can access the variable without creating an object of the class.