The Program Optimization course I followed did something similar with regular CPUs / GPUs. It started out as "don't do stupid things", but it quickly went into

The Program Optimization course I followed did something similar with regular CPUs / GPUs. It started out as "don't do stupid things", but it quickly went into SoA vs AoS, via hand-writing AVX intrinsics, into eventually running OpenCL code on the GPU. Part of your grade depended on the performance of your code, with a bonus for the fastest submission. It led to a very nice semi-competitive semi-collaborative atmosphere.