[ChrisSD]

I think learning some assembly is essential for any student that wants to use a low level programming language. It's a good way to learn not only about pointers but also the stack, registers, etc. I don't mean they need to be able to manually create a full program in assembly but doing simple exercises can be enlightening on their own.

Of course you also have to mention that even assembly is an abstraction. Memory isn't really a big array, cpus have caches and all that jazz. This matters when writing performant algorithms.