alt Hacker News>Roll a ball off of a standard classroom table. Use a 1990s wristwatch's stopwatch mechanism to start the clock when the ball rolls of the table. Stop the stopwatch when the ball hits the floor.
Our class had some kind of device that would either punch a hole, or make a mark on paper at a regular time interval. We attached a narrow strip of paper to the ball, and let it pull through the marking device as it fell from the bench to the floor. We then measured the distance between each mark, noting that the distance increased with each interval, using this to calculate g. I don't recall anything more than that, or how I did on that lab. I received a 50 one marking period for lack of handing in labs, but had a 90+ average otherwise in the class.
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That's an interesting way to measure the passage of time -- just use something that produces a "regular distance" and derive a way from kinematics to calculate the acceleration from the change in the distance.
Ticker tape timer. My class had the same thing for the same experiment.
... like something that burns a hole in the paper with a spark or marks thermal paper with a burst of heat.
In the UK we called it ticket tape and it was terrible. The devices barely worked and they cause a bunch of friction so you end up calculating a value of 'g' that's off by like 30%.