>It's an equivalent of self-compiling a software project after checking out its repo

I would not assign this to someone as their first electronics project. They would have to order all the components and get the PCB etched themselves. There's a fair bit of soldering, and a usable soldering iron is not cheap. And there's no undo button in hardware: if you solder something in backwards and pop it, you get pay for a new component and wait for it to ship to you.