The best class I ever took was a computer architecture course where we built up an 8-bit minicomputer from individual gates onward in a logic simulator. It was based on the Tanenbaum Structured Computer Organization and the Patt and Patel "Introduction to Computing Systems* books. By the end we were programming it in a limited dialect of assembly and also with a minimal version of C that compiled down to that assembly dialect. Very cool, and I've never been mystified by pointers since then.