The main purpose of this paper is to present an ongoing research study on the evolution of pre-numerical and pre-inductive levels of ordinal thought in students from three to seven years old. Our methodology is based on multimedia technology, an automatic and objective record of the data and minimal interaction between students and researcher. A set of multimedia tasks organised according to an evolutionary model of ordinal COMPETENCES, generated with the Macromedia Director tool, was implemented and the corresponding responses analysed. These tasks were conceived according to the theory on the production of multimedia items and some constructive principles about multimedia learning. Our first conclusions prove the usefulness of this methodology and show the existence of solid evolutionary patterns at different stages of the proposed model. (Contains 4 figures.)