The relevance of the research is due to the increasing popularity of online learning and the lack of scientifically based criteria for analysing and designing new programs. The article provides an overview of international research and teaching practices on the following topics: the impact of Internet use on the mental development and academic results of children aged 5-12 years; the relationship between the use of various digital learning tools and the formation of various components of cognitive and communication development; the influence of the digital component of learning on students ' academic achievements; teaching children the basics of programming in order to form their computational thinking. In this study, the numbers of paperes related to the digital transformation of preschool and primary education were identified. The number of such articles for Scopus was 1709, and for Web of Science 984. Term maps were visualized in the period 2000–2020. The three clusters for Web of Science relate to the Internet, gaming learning applications, and computational thinking. After that, we analysed 60 sources that most fully represent these three clusters. The paper draws the following conclusions: to date, most studies are based on comparing the significance of the psychological and pedagogical effect of traditional training and education with the active use of digital technologies. There are few studies comparing different types of digital environments and online educational technologies; conflicting data on the impact of digital media and online technology on educational outcomes suggests that development of psycho-pedagogical typology of mechanisms for online learning that would take into account the peculiarities of interaction between child, teacher and digital environments, is urgently relevant; today, we have a fairly large array of data on the positive impact of digital gaming environments on the formation of creative abilities.