SystemC vs other HDLs
You're at university and studying (presumably) to be an engineer.  As an engineer you should understand how things work at a low level.  In order to achieve this you need to strip away layers of abstraction, not add them.

For this reason, my advice is that you don't use SystemC for this project.  You may end up using it in your professional career, but that's for the future.

If you choose to use it anyway then you should speak to your lecturer first.  When I did a similar task at university, we were explicitly told not to use SystemC for the reason that I've outlined above.