Another beginners question

At my university we had classes in VHDL. We first started by making a sevensegment decoder. The switches were inputs, the sevensegs, what else, were outputs. This was then expanded to a four-sevenseg decoder to start on portmapping. Then we made stuff like a comparator, multiplexer etc. I beleve we also did a simple version of a "knightrider effect". A shift register that is connected to the leds of the board and it shifts one bit over the leds bouncing it from the edges. These shouldn't be too hard if you take it step by step.