Early Years Toolbox (EYT) Mr. Ant is an iPad-based assessment of children's working memory (i.e., the amount of visual information that they can concurrently coordinate in mind). In this game, children encounter a cartoon character – Mr. Ant – who has placed a number of coloured stickers on different parts of his body. After a short time Mr. Ant disappears and, once he reappears without any stickers, the child is asked to recall the locations of the stickers by tapping where the stickers used to be. Trials are presented in order of difficulty, with a stop rule after a prescribed number of incorrect responses to prevent frustration associated with overly difficult items. This game takes approximately 5-8 minutes to complete.

Scores are presented on the final assessment screen. For more precise research applications, there are options to have the item-by-item data sent to a user-specified e-mail address or database. For more information, training videos and analysis resources, please visit http://www.eytoolbox.com.au

Languages embedded: English, Afrikaans, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Danish, French, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Shangaan, Sotho, Spanish, Swedish, Xhosa, Zulu, and more in progress

About the Early Years Toolbox:

The 'Early Years Toolbox' (EYT, for short) is comprised of brief, engaging game-like assessments of children’s self-regulation, executive functioning and vocabulary. These assessments are based on well-established and widely used measures, yet have been adapted and optimised on the basis of 20+ years of research experience working with young children.

NOTE FOR RESEARCHERS: If using this app for research and/or publication purposes, please cite the following as the original source article:

Howard, S. J., & Melhuish, E. (2017). An Early Years Toolbox (EYT) for assessing early executive function, language, self-regulation, and social development: Validity, reliability and preliminary norms. Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment, 35(3), 255-275.