Hey David,
A lot of AWT has been replaced by what is known as Swing. You will still use some things from AWT like the event listeners (ex. java.awt.event.ActionListener) and layout managers, but most of the graphical stuff like Panel, Button, and TextField can be replaced by JPanel, JButton, JTextField in Swing. Here's a beginner's tutorial to get you familiar with using Swing.
http://www.javabeginner.com/java-swing/java-swing-tutorial Enjoy!
Edit: Also I asked the instructor if we could use Swing components even though the project seemed to specify only AWT and he assured me that using Swing was fine because you're still going to use components from the java.awt.* and java.awt.event.* classes anyway.