The details are blurry but one thing I remember from my compilers course (Warsaw University, around 1995) was generation of simple stack-based machine code from an AST. Arithmetic, simple branching and loops were covered.

This was a very effective way to grasp the code generation without getting bogged in lexing/parsing, register assignment (the machine was stack-based) and so on.

Sadly we later moved to the hard parts. Manual LALR(1) machine generation was probably the dullest grindwork in the whole CS curriculum :)