[Karliss]

It is more engaging to do something related to the software students (might) be using daily or at least have some experience. It's easier to show of the final result to (non programming) friends, or get some ideas for potentially useful tools or at least fun toys.

Sure for experienced developers command line tools are used daily (at least for some developers), but for many students it can be alien world that they don't use outside the lessons.

Also overall usefulness. Simple terminal program that responds with a fixed message, is just an exerciser but otherwise useless. You need to get a lot more complicated to make useful tool. But a chatbot which responds with fixed messages (usually FAQ type stuff) is a commonly used tool for the purpose of community management.