Abstract
<jats:p><p><strong>Context and relevance.</strong> Digital gaming environments are widely used for diagnostics and development of students and their specific abilities, for example, S. Papert&rsquo;s approach of teaching programming. The important feature of game environments is the students&rsquo; autonomy in setting learning tasks. Therefore, games have great potential for the development of generalized ways of actions while solving practical problems. <strong>Objective.</strong> This study, based on the approach of V.V. Davydov, L.V. Bercfai, V.V. Rubtsov, A.M. Medvedev and Y.V. Gromyko, is dedicated to the diagnostics of learning activity of middle school students when working in digital game environment created for learning programming. <strong>Hypothesis.</strong> The work forms a hypothesis about the possible levels of learning activity in the digital game environment, which allows combining direct operations on objects represented in the game with the program control of these objects with the help of the special visual language. <strong>Methods and materials.</strong> The diagnostics was based on the educational game "Apiary Defence", developed in the framework of the National Cyberphysical Platform "Berloga". The study involved 189 students (163 males, 26 females) in grades 4-7, mean age 12,2 (SD = 1,04). <strong>Results. </strong>The diagnostic results showed that independent individual progress of students in a digital game environment does not allow them to reach high levels of learning activity, including overcoming the sign naturalization of the visual tools of the game. This result is not related to the students&rsquo; class. <strong>Conclusions. </strong>The further study of the psychological mechanisms underlying the transition from the mastering of individual operations to the formation of generalized ways of problem solving is related with the conduct of a forming experiment, which can be based on joint collective activity of students.</p></jats:p>