Probably true. Therefore it might be worth asking what precisely is the object of this college project: is it an excercise in programming, or is it an excercise in embedded systems?

If it's an excercise in programming, then doing floating point & trig functions yourself from first principles is probably quite enough of a challenge in itself. Why not just do it on a PC?

If it's an excercise in embedded systems, then a simple 4-function (add, subtract, multiply, divide) calculator should be fine - floating point is of little relevance to embedded systems!