Simon,
I don't think its that bad as an assignment. As J says, this is a clock with some frills. The clock is on this site in our tutorials, which are on the search engines. The MAX 7221 is on Maxims site, and a search on 7 segment drivers on Google finds it.

No Its pretty straightforward, but it takes a lot of initiative to be an engineer and this assignment tests it to the full.

STeve