We shouldn't let people obtain CS degrees until they've had to write at least one fairly-complex program on a platform with little enough RAM that the amount of code in the program starts to be something they have to optimize (because the program itself takes up space in memory, not just the data it uses, which is something we hopefully all know but rarely think about in practice on modern machines). Tens or low hundreds of KB of memory. Get 'em questioning every instruction and every memory allocation.
I'm only half-joking.
[EDIT] For extra lulz let them use a language with a bunch of fancy modern language features so they get a taste of what those cost, when they realize they can't afford to use some of them.
It's not far fetched. Microcontroller programming should not be seen as magic.
And microcontrollers will never get abundant capacity because smaller and more efficient means less battery, no matter the tech level.
So it's not like "everyone should know the history of the PDP-11" which I would disagree with.
During my schooling we built traffic lights and stuff on tiny machines, and even in VHDL, even though desktop machines were hundreds of MHz. They both have a place still.
I'm only half-joking.
[EDIT] For extra lulz let them use a language with a bunch of fancy modern language features so they get a taste of what those cost, when they realize they can't afford to use some of them.