Redstone is very useful to learn about and visualize electronics, for example logic gates and how to create useful circuits with them, this can include connecting simple "light switches" or a whole computer with CPU, RAM, etc.
Seeing how they work actually helped myself a lot.
When we were talking about logic in class a year ago, we showed the teacher how you can do this in Minecraft and he really liked the idea.
It really does take some time to learn enough about redstone to be able to come up with your own designs - partly because redstone is very weird when you take a closer look - but I think it's worth it, at least for logic / problem solving in general.
There already are a few servers that focus on Redstone only, lots of smart (and young) people there.
Redstone is neat, but try it with a mod such as RedLogic. It gives you the basic logic gates——and, or, xor, timers, pulse formers, etc.——which makes it all much simpler to get started.
It does mean you can skip much of the "physics of redstone", but I don't know how valuable learning that is in the first place. The physics of Redlogic is a fair bit simpler.
Seeing how they work actually helped myself a lot. When we were talking about logic in class a year ago, we showed the teacher how you can do this in Minecraft and he really liked the idea.
It really does take some time to learn enough about redstone to be able to come up with your own designs - partly because redstone is very weird when you take a closer look - but I think it's worth it, at least for logic / problem solving in general.
There already are a few servers that focus on Redstone only, lots of smart (and young) people there.