ScratchJr vs EYT Mr Ant

With ScratchJr, young children (ages 5-7) learn important new skills as they program their own interactive stories and games. By snapping together graphical programming blocks, children can make characters move, jump, dance, and sing. In the process, children learn to solve problems, design projects, and express themselves creatively on the computer. They also use math and language in a meaningful and motivating context, supporting the development of early-childhood numeracy and literacy. With ScratchJr, children don’t just learn to code, they code to learn. ScratchJr was inspired by the popular Scratch programming language (http://scratch.mit.edu), used by millions of people (ages 8 and up) around the world. The ScratchJr interface and programming language were redesigned to make them appropriate for younger children’s cognitive, personal, social, and emotional development. ScratchJr is a collaboration between the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the MIT Media Lab, the Developmental Technologies research group at Tufts University, and the Playful Invention Company. The ScratchJr project has received generous financial support from the National Science Foundation (NSF DRL-1118664), Scratch Foundation, LEGO Foundation, and British Telecommunications. If you enjoy using this free app, please consider making a donation to the Scratch Foundation (www.scratchfoundation.org), a nonprofit organization that provides ongoing support for ScratchJr. We appreciate donations of all sizes, large and small.

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, Arabic, Afrikaans, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Mandinka, 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.