Investigation of secondary school students' computational thinking skills and attitudes to coding according to digital game playing features

21st century Computational thinking skills, which are among the skills of computational thinking, and algorithmic thinking skills can be used to solve the problems encountered today. Playing digital games can have a direct or indirect effect on these cognitive skills. In this study, it was aimed to examine the differentiation of secondary school students' computational thinking skills and attitudes towards coding according to their digital game playing characteristics. In the study, the relationship of these variables with each other and with some demographic variables was examined. The sample of the research consists of 468 secondary school students, 266 girls and 202 boys, studying in Sakarya in the 2020-2021 academic year. This research method can be given as an example to survey and causal comparison type research from quantitative methods. "Personal Information Form", "Children's Computer Game Addiction Scale", and "Computational Thinking Skills Test" were used as data collection tools in the research. SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) 25.0 program was used in the analysis of the data. Descriptive statistics, Pearson Product Moments Correlation Analysis and Independent Samples T-Test were used in the analysis of the research data. The level of significance in the statistics was taken as <.05. As a result of the research, when the digital game playing characteristics of secondary school students are examined, the most played games are war and adventure games, the most played games are Pubg, Brawl Stars, Roblox, Minecraft, Zula, Valorant, secondary school students generally play games between 0-1 hours a day. and game addiction levels are low. When the differentiation status of secondary school students' attitudes towards coding according to their digital game playing characteristics is examined, it is seen that the level of attitudes towards coding of students who play puzzle, adventure and strategy game types is higher than those who do not play these game types. It is seen that the level of attitude towards coding of the students who play games for 0-1 hours a day is higher than the students who play games for 3-5 hours. It is seen that the computational thinking skill levels of the students do not differ according to their digital game playing characteristics. It is seen that the students' level of attitude towards coding is high and does not differ according to the gender variable, but differs according to the grade level variable. It is seen that the level of attitude towards coding of 8th grade students is lower than other grade levels. It is seen that students' computational thinking skills levels are low and they do not differ according to gender and grade level variables.