Material modeling of school knowledge. The practice of design and development in the education industry

Before educational materials are used in schools, they start out at a different place: as products to be developed, they are designed and produced in the education industry. The paper allows for the ethnographic analysis of the exemplary development of scientific teaching materials intended for use in primary schools. A diverse team of developers-natural scientists, primary school teachers, publishers, and so on-constructs knowledge resources and materializes them by designing various objects so that the didactically "loaded" material can be exported into the classroom for later teaching. In this process, the developers discuss and anticipate, for example, the knowledge of physics and real-world knowledge of pupils. In the end, they produce a product design which shows in a surprising way how school knowledge gets its (material) shape.