I hope that The Bit Lab will be such a place. The students in the Math and Computer Science department have access to school labs with PCs and lots of user-software. Many student have machines and soon they all will. There is a campus network with email and a web server, and we now have Blackboard. At present, the hard drives in the lab are read-only, and thus so are all the programs.
Students use data files on floppies.
They need to be able to deal with programs too, not just data. We want a place where where computer students can learn to manage computers, upgrade hardware, play with operating systems, install software, set up a network, get email working or host a web site. We need a facility for high-power computing, computer graphics, sound processing, animation and other large programming problems. The answer I propose is The Bit Lab. I propose a lab with 6-10 high powered machines, assembled and managed by students.