Funny, it looks like the practical work we had to do in our CS master class "advanced digital systems design", something like 20 years ago, on a nowadays archaic XC4013 FPGA... (including the VGA part).
We had a vaguely similar lab at Cambridge. We were given a mostly-implemented MIPS machine in Verilog (IIRC we just had to write the code that visualised the memory on screen), and had to implement GoL to run on the MIPS core.
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/0910/ECAD+Arch/lab2/