My students do this on the GameBoy Advance specifically so they don't need to learn about dynamic memory allocation to get useful things done early in my course. In fact, they only learn about dynamic memory allocation for academic reasons later on and never _need_ to use it in their games.
Zig in particularly makes this really approachable. Too dumb to pull it off in C myself, trivial in Zig.
YMMV.
https://github.com/ijustlovemath/bfi
You can also do ergonomically nice things using static allocation in many data structures, like linked lists (as a tiny example: https://github.com/ijustlovemath/linked-list/blob/master/ll....). That way you can focus on the concepts that matter; the data structures, and not frustrate newbies with opaque and difficult-to-reason allocation issues (at least not at first!)
This sounds interesting - Any information / course material available online? (I found nothing in your hn profile...)