Scheme is deadly boring. You'd lose a lot of students that way. Starting with bits and bytes and hardware would be pretty goddamn fun, I think.

I first really got into things with assembly language for DOS. It was interesting to directly control the IRQ controller, real-time clock, interval timer, and keyboard interface. These were all motherboard chips that could be messed with.

Years later I passed a mandatory Scheme class. I tolerated it to get my degree, but I was furious. I handed in just enough assignments to pass the class. If the degree had started with Scheme or required very much of it, I would have found something less miserable to do with my life.