I would even argue it is much better than trying to do so on a more modern system, as you directly can just use graphics and color (which is both fun and helps teach a lot of programming concepts that are useful to know for building UIs later) without wasting a ton of time learning some UI toolkit that will be neither instructive nor actually-useful in the real world (as even if you choose a good one, it is almost certainly going to be obsolete by the time you go to get a job).

Here is a nice quick tutorial on using the frame buffer in Linux: https://cmcenroe.me/2018/01/30/fbclock.html

Raw pointers in C++ are an introductory concept at this point.

You also have l-value references, r-value references, smart pointers (unique, weak, shared, etc), and many of those have a use-case that overlaps with raw pointers.