Students and teachers can build their own photo-gate timing systems.

Teachers and students can build their own systems of photo-gate timers from discrete components, for kinematics. Users can make their own code to time passages through an array of gates or to get speed from closely spaced gates, and display the values, using US$25 microcontrollers. Students using equipment they made themselves may have more investment in the work they do in kinematics labs. Students also may learn electronic circuits and coding at the same time as kinematics.

Over the past few decades, coding the gates has moved from assembly to proprietary to Python—We provide versions of the code in all these forms.

EnergyTeachers.org Inc. (ETO) is a twenty-year-old nonprofit started by members of the New England Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers looking to gather and share curriculum resources for modern topics like energy production and use, and electronics. ETO keeps a library of materials including books, curriculum guides, scientific instruments, and electronics parts, for developing, training, and lending.