r/PhysicsTeaching

Hello Everyone,

I am a high school physics teacher in NYC. Every time I try to design a new lab to go through with my students, I find I am missing some piece of equipment or that the items I do have are broken and need replacing. But the only large scale options for this equipment is usually PASCO and Vernier, who are dramatically overpriced for the equipment, and then usually have some fee that must be paid just for their graphing utility software. So if I want to use motion detectors for a kinematics lab, I need to shell out at least ~$120 for a new device. This of course limits how many of these I can buy, and makes it difficult to do a lab with the whole class. I am a bit tired of it, so I was thinking of making my own.

What I have found is that although LoggerPRO and SPARKVue have nice bells and whistles, at their core they are just data loggers with a graphing utility built in. Easily replicated and can be made open source (I already have an MVP of this actually). There goes ~$200 per year just to access this (although IO recently saw PASCO plans on releasing a free version this summer).

I also found that they sell motion detectors for between $120 and $150 depending on whether you get the wireless version or not, but the same core features can be replicated for much less money (my initial estimates are that you could sell one for between $40-$60 and still make a profit) while achieving a comparable level of accuracy.

So my question before I go down this rabbit hole of making some equipment is whether or not other physics teachers are experiencing similar monetary constraints when purchasing lab equipment, and primarily, would more affordable lab equipment make it easier for you/your school to properly outfit your Physics classrooms? Essentially I am trying to assess the viability/usefulness of this as an idea. If doing this would make it easier to get students actually doing and experiencing science rather than just learning about it in lecture, then I think it is worth doing, but the other challenge would be getting schools/districts to actually purchase equipment from a smaller seller and not from the big brand names like PASCO and Vernier. So as a follow up, I would also like to ask what the purchasing process is like for you at your schools when you need to buy more equipment, and whether or not those in charge of making the decision of what to purchase and from whom would be open to making a change from their current lab equipment provider? Any thoughts or opinions you can share on this matter would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!