The project consists of approximately weekly milestones where students work to evolve their project towards a functional microkernel-based operating system. Each milestone broadly specifies additional functionality required to be demonstrated in order to meet the milestone. Students have a large degree of design freedom within each milestone.

After familiarisation milestones, students are expected to pair up and contribute to the same code base, but passing a milestone is assessed individually.

Milestones are assessed via demonstrations. When demonstrating, a student is expected to:

show a working solution,
explain how the code works, and
explain any design decisions made.

Lab demonstrators are available daily. Labs are provided for students to discuss proposed solutions, seek help, receive feedback, and demonstrate their projects for assessment purposes.

The project milestones form the heart of the course and it is where the majority of the time is spent in the course. We expect approximately 10 hours per week focused on project related work, notwithstanding introducing difficult bugs.