Some schools have Lego Mindstorms, which have a primitive programming system. I mean, it's not hat hard to teach stuff like conditionals, loops, object, etc. The idea of anything taught at this level is to familiarize the student for higher-level work. We do spend 4 years teaching algebra, after all.

Why do we care about ground water in Mars? Don't we have bigger things to do here on Earth? All these Mars missions seem like a major waste of resources. Where is our moon base?