In hindsight this make a lot of sense. Growing up, it didn't. I did my schooling in a small Indian city where from Grade 3-5 (that's approx 8-10 year old) we were given access to Logo in the computer room and instructed to make things (very basic stuff, initially, and progressively interesting things like spirals etc).

It was quite baffling then, till, say start of my undergrad (age 18), on what was the point of learning to control a turtle using simple commands. It hit me finally, as I was trying to learn actual programming.

A lot of people (in my circles) say that learning to program is intuitive, easy. I have never believed that. To teach something like HTML/CSS/How to use MS Word etc would be far, far worse experience (I'm looking at you, second tier Indian schools) than learning to move a turtle using simple commands. If nothing else, it brings home the idea of moving commands to actuate things on the computer.

PS: I suppose you can make the argument that this is also accomplished by video games but I hold that syntactically coherent commands (LT 90; FD 10) give a better insight into command-action nature of interaction than (Up arrow; Up arrow; move mouse to enemy; left click).