ADXL335 breakout board as a tilt switch

I am a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has been assigned the task of developing a small gadget should be able to read inclination from an accelerometer and use that data as a switch for a stopwatch (In other words, start the stopwatch at a certain inclination and then stop the stopwatch at a certain inclination). I am a complete beginner with absolutely no prior experience with Arduino or programming so I was looking to get a little bit of insight as to how I can approach creating such a device.

google "adxl335 arduino" and look at the various articles it throws up?

readout this link http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/ADXL3xx