I have another idea, based on the observation that traditional compiler building courses are like a "waterfall" and the OP's proposal is simply a "reverse water

I have another idea, based on the observation that traditional compiler building courses are like a "waterfall" and the OP's proposal is simply a "reverse waterfall." What if the course was designed based on an "Agile," evolutionary methodology? In that course, you would divide the course work in 4 "scrums". In each scrum you do a little bit of everything (little bit of lex, little bit of parse, little bit of syntax analysis, little bit of code generation). In the first scrum you also would cover the architecture and high level overview of the "roadmap." Of course, at the end of the first "scrum" you would have a very primitive compiler for a very primitive language and without a lot of error checking, but students would have been exposed to the end to end experience. The second and subsequent "scrums" would only deepen each part of the compiler, and students would benefit from knowing the interactions across modules and simply learning more sophisticated techniques. I remember when building my first compiler in college that I really had no clue why we were learning about tokenization and state machines for so long when I really wanted to generate optimized code.