Will you be able to show off the results? I'd be really pretty interested to see what some 2nd year comp-sci students come up with.

The pipe dream part of me wants you to have them stick their results on github and work with each other, or start getting taught stuff by ... well, everyone.

My high-school comp-sci teacher is a large part of the reason why I can reason clearly about code, and he would push us in directions like this -- not as extreme, but similar in the "ok, here's an end goal that you can achieve by thinking about it and making combinations of what you know" sense.

I know a lot of programmers who don't grok compilers, even at a high level, and it's a shame -- a lot of things are a lot easier, and you open the doors to doing a lot more if you do.