There seem to be a strong belief that everything what is done for scientific purpose is "useful" automatically, though it is not always the case. Occasionally massive amounts of resources of huge supercomputers and research clusters are wasted for useless tests, mistakes, typos, accidentally executed tasks, wrong input data, wrong configurations, etc, which then run for weeks or months with zero use afterwards. So indeed if this popularizes @Home projects for young people then it is very beneficial.