Esero: journey through space

MAKING SPACE SCIENCE CLEAR AND USABLE IN THE PRIMARY CLASSROOM

Commissioned by ESA’s educational programme ESERO, hosted in the Netherlands by NEMO Science Museum, the project required translating complex scientific concepts into clear, usable learning material for teachers and students. Developed as a 500-page sourcebook, it brings together explanations, experiments, observations, stories and practical activities that guide learners through eighty structured lessons, ranging from the movement of celestial bodies to planetary science and space exploration.

Lopezlab created the narrative and visual strategy underpinning the publication. We organised a large and heterogeneous body of input (teacher interviews, expert feedback, curriculum requirements, photography and scientific references) into a coherent editorial system. This included defining the didactic structure, designing navigation tools, and developing the visual language that supports comprehension: diagrams, icons, illustrations and consistent typographic cues.

Clarity and cognitive accessibility were central. The book integrates multiple types of content (concepts, procedures, assignments, reflection points) and required a system that allows students to move intuitively through different learning modes without losing orientation. The visual framework was designed to be both engaging and accurate, drawing on references from science communication, space exploration and everyday classroom practice.

Originally developed for the Dutch curriculum, the sourcebook has since been adapted for several other ESERO countries, including the UK, Hungary, France and Poland, under the guidance of Lopezlab. This international implementation confirmed the need for a stable, scalable editorial architecture: one capable of supporting scientific accuracy while remaining flexible enough to accommodate different educational contexts.

The result is a publication and accompanying online material that enable teachers to work with astronomy in a structured, confident way, and give students a clear and motivating entry point into space science