XAMPP

XAMPP is a "portable" version of MySQL/Apache/PHP. You can run XAMPP out of any directory, meaning that you don't need to run an installer requiring admin privileges to use it. It is available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

You can use the "USB/Lite" version for Windows for labs and assignments requiring MySQL and phpmyadmin. A local copy is here:

xampp-win32-1.7.7-usb-lite.exe

It is a self-extracting executable: just run it and choose the directory which you would like to contain the XAMPP files. (I recommend using a directory on a hard disk, for example C:/Users/username/xampp, where username is your username.)

Run the xampp_start.exe and xampp_stop.exe programs to start and stop XAMPP. You can access

http://localhost/xampp/

to use the XAMPP web interface.