Set it up once, teach it every term: working with templates
The work of building a good lab machine should be done once, not rebuilt from memory every semester.
Every teacher of a practical unit knows the start of term ritual: rebuild the environment, remember which tools you installed last time, discover the one setting you forgot, and patch it live while the first class watches. It is a waste of your best energy on the busiest week of the year.
A golden machine you can clone
With StudentLabs you set a machine up properly once, with the exact tools, datasets and configuration your unit needs, and save it as a template. From then on, a whole class is just copies of that one machine you know works. Everyone starts from the same place, every single time.
Why this matters beyond convenience
You get a few things for that. There is no more "it works on mine but not on theirs", because every student starts from the same place. Next term's class becomes a click instead of an afternoon. And when you improve the template, the whole next cohort gets the improvement without you touching each machine.
It also makes sharing easy. A template that works for one unit can be the starting point for another, or handed to a colleague teaching the same subject at another campus. The institutional knowledge that usually lives in one teacher's head becomes something the whole team can build on.
Treat your lab environment like code: build it once, version it, reuse it. Your future self, three terms from now, will thank you.