Proper and easy are probably mutually exclusive.

I have sympathy for you if your professor expects you to learn this on your own in a very limited time.

Maybe you should print these up in their entirety, bring it to class and hand it to the professor as a 'suggested addendum to the curriculum'.

http://www.debian.org/doc/maint-guide/
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/col...pkg-guide.html

(edit) One quick and dirty (and improper) way to make a package is to download a maemo .deb file, extract the contents with "ar x thedebfile.deb", extract contents.tar.gz and data.tar.gz, remove md5sums file, edit control file (rename package, installed size, change or remove dependencies etc), remove postrm file, edit postinst file as needed, substitute your files for the stuff in the usr/ tree, repack data.tar.gz and control.tar.gz, then create your .deb with "ar q mydebianfile.deb debian-binary control.tar.gz data.tar.gz".