The programme
Eight weeks, 56 days, 168 quests
One skill a day, a lighter day six and a review day seven every week. Written as parallel English and Russian originals — not one translated into the other.
The programme in numbers
Week by week
- Week 1
Me, my battery, and what friendly looks like
Safety and self-understanding first. The child meets Ellie, maps their own interests, maps their sensory battery and agrees an “I need air” signal with a parent, then spends two days as a friendliness detective noticing what friendly people actually do.
The only outward action all week is a smile or a nod — and “nothing came back” is logged as a valid result.
1 / 8 - Week 2
First contact: hello, names and little questions
Turning noticing into tiny repeatable actions: remembering and using names, a four-step greeting with an autism-friendly alternative to eye contact, genuine curiosity, trading information, and listening with a follow-up question.
The review day counts the greetings the child sent, never the answers that came back.
2 / 8 - Week 3
Conversations that swim both ways
Two-way conversations: finding common interests, talking in terms of the other person’s interests, the 50/50 rule, reading interest signals, and leaving a conversation kindly.
Three quests this week end with “tell Ellie how it actually went, including if it did not land”. That is where the week does its real work on shame.
3 / 8 - Week 4
Finding your pod: groups, brave steps and closed doors
Groups and worry: choosing friends who fit (including the online-friend rule — a parent knows the server, and anyone who wants chats kept secret from parents is a red flag), thoughts are not facts, the five-step way into a group conversation, what a closed door does and does not mean, and a brave-steps ladder with before-and-after worry ratings.
Gentler than its title sounds: the group join is rehearsed at home, and doing it at school is marked bonus, never required.
4 / 8 - Week 5
The kind of friend I want to be
Giving rather than getting, placed deliberately between the two hardest weeks: sincere appreciation instead of flattery, following up on what people told you, being a good sport, encouragement, and the first self-advocacy day — asking for what you need, kindly.
One quest engineers a likely loss on purpose, so being a good sport is practised rather than discussed.
5 / 8 - Week 6
Rough waters: teasing, arguments and hurt feelings
Staying steady when it gets hard, rehearsed before it is ever needed: bored replies to teasing, the line between teasing and bullying with a three-name list of adults to tell, avoiding pointless arguments, seeing the other side, saying “I was hurt” with an I-statement, and a six-step way through a disagreement.
The real-life quests this week are conditional — only if something real actually happened.
6 / 8 - Week 7
Coming back together: repair, rejection and real get-togethers
Repair and the capstone: a three-part apology and its other half (you never apologise for who you are or for needing a break), repairing after a fight with a friend who was fair to you, the full treatment of “why did she go with her and not me”, and planning, hosting and being a guest at a small get-together.
This is the real peak of the programme — the week the child actually asks someone. Day 7 handles the get-together that went badly.
7 / 8 - Week 8
My own dialect: keeping friends and staying me
Maintenance and identity: keeping a friendship alive with small regular contact, telling a safe person how you work best (masking named directly), balancing pod time and solo time, a coping card for when worry comes back, gratitude pointed backwards, and a final story where the child is the friendly one welcoming the new kid.
Closes the loop with week 1, then hands over to the Pod.
8 / 8
The rhythm inside a week
- Days 1–5
- One skill per day: a 3–5 minute lesson, three quests, a check-in.
- Day 6
- Lighter and home-based, with no real-world social risk required: a social story read with Ellie, a sensory self-care day, or online etiquette. One quest is always rest, recharge, or free time on the child’s own interest.
- Day 7
- Review. No new skill — a look back, a card or a map, a “teach it to someone” quest, a celebration, and a pointer to next week. Completing the check-in alone is enough to keep the streak.
And then day 57
Day 56 is not a cliff. The programme ends by handing over to the Pod: one small task a day, chosen by the child, the same streak, one free day a week, and Ellie unchanged. The Pod is designed and promised in the content but has no written specification yet — it is the next thing to build, and this page will not pretend otherwise.
The gaps we already know about
- Online etiquette gets one home-based day, for an audience whose social life is substantially online. It should be more.
- Carnegie’s “don’t criticise, condemn or complain” never gets a day of its own; it is taught inside the avoiding-arguments day.
- The points curve does not track the difficulty curve — week 3 pays the most while the two hardest weeks pay less. That is a balance fix, not a rewrite.
- The programme has not been trialled with a group of children. It is written from published method and reviewed against it; that is where the evidence currently stops.
- There is one cast list for the whole programme (content/cast.json) and week 8 follows it; weeks 1–7 still drift on the Russian protagonist’s name and are being aligned to it.
A note on the writing
Both languages are written as originals. The Russian is deliberately gender-neutral where the grammar allows, so the app never assumes how a child refers to themselves. One cast list covers the whole programme, and a friend never shares a name with a character who excludes or teases — a small rule that keeps 56 days of stories readable.
Want to know when it opens?
There is no signup, no beta and no store listing yet. When there is, you will get exactly one email about it.
Or write to us directly: oleksandr@netzet.com