CMU's Compilers course (15-411)[1] does a lot of what you want. Students write code generation code in the very first assignment. A particular delight of this approach is that the first assignment is for compiling straight line code while one of the later ones is for optimization. If you implement SSA form for the optimization assignment, all of the test cases from the first assignment compile down to effectively one precomputed result. Very clear marker for how far you've progressed!
Thanks! This looks really cool! There are a number of courses coming out with this kind of philosophy. I really like what I've seen of the nanopass framework, for example.
[1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~janh/courses/411/16/