We proudly announce the commence of the project “Working Through” that is an Erasmus project coordinated by Habilis in Greece with partners from Greece, Cyprus, Ireland and Denmark.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder with prevalence rates of 1 in 68 individuals. ASD manifests with a lack of social and communication skills, stereotypical, repetitive or restrictive behaviors.

In most cases it is accompanied by other neurodevelopmental disorders (learning, language or coordination).

Individuals with ASD face important challenges in their social encounters due to a lack of intuitive social ability.

WORKINGTHROUGH project offers a high-quality learning opportunity through the use of Virtual Reality (VR) technology in combination with social scripts to train individuals with Autism in “soft” skills (interpersonal intelligence, communication) in increasingly challenging work environments.

The main Objectives of the project are:

• To develop a description of the social communication deficits of individuals with Autism and the recognition for the value of using VR.
• To design and develop an Interpersonal, communication and social intelligence skills curriculum for individuals with ASD
• To develop a toolkit with an initial set of VR social stories that will be used for both training and assessment purposes.
• To develop a certification system for the assessment of the training content. Each training module will consist of learning objectives that will correspond to training scenarios. Each scenario will be based on a social script with the trainee using an avatar in order to respond to the different situations.
• To train partners' staff in the use of VR technologies.
• To train 10 individuals with ASD in each country (Greece, Ireland, Denmark and Cyprus) in order to test the effect of the methodology and the tools.
• To develop a matching mechanism for identifying the best job profile for each individual based on his/her achievements.
• To offer the toolkit for free and the corresponding manuals to be used worldwide.

MMC is really looking forward to contributing to the success of this project.