Table Tennis for People with Autism

Background Autistic individuals manifest pronounced difficulties in social interactions. These difficulties restrict their social activities and inadvertently promote a sedentary lifestyle which frequently leads to a number of health issues. These difficulties become quite severe in young adulthood when there are no viable choices in terms of daily activities. This is a uniform finding regardless of level of functioning and may give rise to mental health issues that are usually dealt with medically. Objectives SPAUT is a project aiming to increase sports involvement of autistic individuals. Specifically this is achieved by training physical ed teachers how to use virtual reality technology in order to instruct autistic persons how to play table tennis. Teachers are instructed with the use of an e-learning platform which uses a curriculum focussing on the idiosyncrasies of Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) as well as different teaching techniques with the use of virtual reality technology. Implementation All partners explored the landscape of sports for autistic individuals and more specifically table tennis (IO1) in order to develop a curriculum (IO2) which guided the production of instructional content placed in an e-learning platform (moodle) so as to familiarise table tennis coaches with Autism (IO3) , assess and certify their progress towards mastery (IO4) and finally enable them to use virtual reality technology (IO3) in order to teach autistic persons how to play table tennis (IO5). Achievements All activities were carried out successfully. The project attracted the interest of a number of stakeholders in each country and mobilised the support of many families of autistic individuals culminating in five very successful final conferences. Most importantly all sports clubs will be running programs specifically aimed at training autistic persons in table tennis and many coaches became familiar with dealing with autistic athletes.