The emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has brought both challenges and opportunities for education. In this paper, we propose a GenAI-empowered, group-based authentic assessment for a Network Engineering course. This group assignment promotes challenge-based learning (CBL) and leverages GenAI to enhance students' creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and technical problem-solving skills, while also improving students' GenAI literacy through fostering their ability to effectively engage with GenAI tools. The authenticity of this assignment is reflected in two folds: 1) students engage in a real-world engineering challenge, roleplaying as network engineers, and 2) they develop essential skills for co-creating solutions using GenAI tools, a key competency for future engineers. The group assignment is structured into five stages, each aligned with Bloom's Taxonomy to progressively develop cognitive skills from understanding foundational knowledge to synthesis, evaluation, and creation. To mitigate challenges such as overreliance on GenAI tools and varying levels of digital literacy, we provide guidance on the responsible and ethical use of GenAI, design reflective assessment tasks with constructive feedback, and establish clear marking criteria that emphasise both the learning process and the final outputs of the assignment. Initial evaluation and feedback from trials have highlighted the effectiveness of using GenAI tools in addressing complex engineering challenges and the value of collaborating in a real-world engineering context. This innovative approach demonstrates the potential of GenAIempowered authentic assessments to enhance learning experiences in technical fields like Network Engineering.

The increasing demand to provide new network services in a timely and efficient manner is driving the need to design, test and deploy networks quickly and consistently. Testing and verifying at scale is a challenge: network equipment is expensive, requires space, power and cooling, and there is never enough test equipment for everyone who wants to use it! Network virtualization technologies enable a flexible environment for educators, researchers, and operators to create functional models of current, planned, or theoretical networks. This demonstration will show VIRL --- the Virtual Internet Routing Lab --- a platform that can be used for network change validation, training, education, research, or network-aware applications development. The platform combines network virtualization technologies with virtual machines (VMs) running open-source and commercial operating systems; VM orchestration capabilities; a context-aware configuration engine; and an extensible data-collection framework. The system simplifies the process to create both simple and complex environments, run simulations, and collect measurement data.