I'm going to be "the guy"...
How are you at the level in an EE course that you are required to make this and do not know how? How are you this far along and do not know that ARM is an architecture and not a "thing"? It's like needing to pull a trailer and saying you're going to use an engine. You are aware that this will be roughly 10% hardware and 90% software, right? Are you prepared to write the firmware? How about the software to read and display the USB data on the PC?
I don't want to be negative, but at this point in your college career, you should understand this in far more detail. We can give you all the tips in the world, but that is moot if you don't grasp the basics. And no, we will not design this for you.
I can't tell as I don't know how far he/she is in his bachelor. For all we know this person is a first year bachelor, and we were all very green at some point.
That being said, in my experience, guiding students only needs technical supervision on a macro scale. The micro scale stuff is thought with books, readouts, courses, a quick google search, and many students are diligent and excited enough to work through this when they want. Being this kind of autodidact is also whats expected when working in the field IMO. A junior engineer that continuously needs help with coding and soldering gets tiresome real fast. But then again, thats why they are junior.
In my bachelor, much more of the supervision was focused on project stuff. Organizing your work, doing a proper literature research, arranging groups, preparing and holding useful meetings, building work ethics, and setting expectations and priorities to meet the deadlines set.
So going back to what I just said, I've no clue about the level of the student and therefore I wouldn't be so harsh. But I do agree that the question does sound very uninformed, and given the complexity of designing an oscilloscope, would make it a challenging prospect. I wouldn't fault a student if its a 1st or 2nd year project. But if it is for a thesis, then he/she (and the educational program to some degree - because they also failed) has got a problem.
Since its an educational project, I will answer in questions that are didactic in nature:
- If you say an oscilloscope connected to an USB port, what is the purpose of the USB port? Is it just there for powering the scope and is it a standalone unit? Or does the data need to go to a PC to be processed and displayed? How are you going to make this data transfer? What pros/cons can you think of design decisions made here?
- What kind of processor or controller do you intend to use? Is it ready-made hardware? Do you have an IDE and compiler installed? Do you have a programmer set up? Are there code examples you can start out with, for example, create a hello world or blinky project?
- What peripherals do you need to use to interface with the ADC? How are you going to set the sampling rate? What design decisions would a 1MHz sample rate imply on your hardware and software architecture? What peripherals does the processor have to help with this? (suggestion: DMA)
- How are you going to process (if any) the ADC samples? What kind of operations does an oscilloscope need to perform? Think about waveform capture but also triggering. What kind of data structure(s) is useful to have?
- Stay realistic; aiming for 1MHz right away is could be a tall order. You could also first work at a lower sample rate and go from there.