If you wanna implement logic operations using neural networks (you'll need 1 neuron for most of them - but XOR and NAND will require a few more and some tricks) and combine them to do some non-trivial computation - which is simple but good enough for a first year project - have a look at the first 3 chapters of this free book for an overview of this topic and have a look at the last chapter focusing on hardware for neural networks implementations (which will come in handy if we're not talking about software implementation) --> http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/rojas/neural/