TECH Center

The TECH Center is a computer lab and technology center, located at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is the largest facility of it's kind in the United States, featuring a large-scale 24-hour lab, Help Desk, and resources for teaching and learning. The facility opened in January 2006, in the university's Bell Building, located at 12th Street and Montgomery Avenue. The word "TECH" in the facility's title is an acronym for TEACHING, EDUCATION, COLLABORATION, HELP.

Development

The goal of the TECH Center is provide the Temple University students with the technical tools they need for their studies, and to provide a collaborative, social environment where they can work on group projects together and socialize. It has become a social hub and a major landmark on Temple University's main campus. The TECH Center was initially conceived as a facility for consolidating many of the software packages used throughout the university into a single, 24-hour lab.

Since opening in January 2006, the TECH Center has received over 2.6 million student visits. During the month of April 2007 alone, there were over 150,000 visits. It exceeded one million total visits between 10am and 11am on January 21, 2007.

Facility

The TECH Center is a 75,000-square-ft., facility. Designed with a variety of workspaces to enable students to work collaboratively or individually, the Center is the largest of its kind in the nation.

* 75,000-square-foot academic center open 24 hours a day
* Wi-Fi available anywhere on site
* 500 Windows-based workstations
* 120 Macintosh workstations.
* 80 loaner laptops (70 PC, 10 Macintosh)
* 150 software packages pre-installed on the workstations
* 13 breakout rooms (five which contain specialized hardware and software)
* Three Whisper Room recording booths, designed for vocal and instrument recording.
* 24-hour Help Desk for students, faculty, and staff.
* Vending machine selling computer and school supplies.
* "Temple's Welcome Center", a 4,260-ft. facility to host University visits by prospective students
* Specialized labs including video editing, graphic design, music composition, software development, and “quiet” labs.
* Custom-build workstation furniture that allow for both individual and group use of computers
* A faculty wing which includes resources such as the Teaching and Learning Center, the Instructional Support Center, a faculty lounge, and faculty breakout room with videoconferencing capability
* A 40-seat presentation room with Internet2 videoconferencing.
* Social space for students with lounge areas and plasma displays
* Lounge furniture that is especially adapted for laptop use.
* 24-hour Starbucks serving coffee and light refreshments
* 12 preselected cable channels are available for viewing on each workstation.
* Students are also have a quota of 800 pages from the printers per year (two six-month periods).

External links

* [http://www.temple.edu/cs/techcenter/ TECH Center Web Site]
* [http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=f0lg6xs477vxjfw0kh8lg62l9c7zxq1c TECH Center article] , Chronicle of Higher Education