I just came back from the Imagine Cup software design competition, and I saw the presentations for the top 6 software design finalists.
More details about the Software Design part of the Imagine Cup:
The "24 hours straight through" part of the story doesn't apply to Software Design. It applies to some other of the challenges like Algorithms, Photography, and Short Film.
Software Design teams came up with the idea themselves (to improve education), and had multiple months to work on it.
Thailand's winning solution isn't just a text-to-speech thing, as the story implies. What it basically does is: Someone with their program and a webcam can place any book in front of the webcam. Their solution not only applies the text-to-speech stuff (for people who can't read the words), but it also tries to make the book more "visual". On a single page, it basically looks through each sentence for the main ideas of it, i.e. actions and verbs. Then it tries to show those ideas visually, with a picture or video. It was a pretty neat project.
Hopefully that clears things up a little. I looked around for a page with a full description of their project, but I wasn't able to find one.
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- The "24 hours straight through" part of the story doesn't apply to Software Design. It applies to some other of the challenges like Algorithms, Photography, and Short Film.
- Software Design teams came up with the idea themselves (to improve education), and had multiple months to work on it.
- Thailand's winning solution isn't just a text-to-speech thing, as the story implies. What it basically does is: Someone with their program and a webcam can place any book in front of the webcam. Their solution not only applies the text-to-speech stuff (for people who can't read the words), but it also tries to make the book more "visual". On a single page, it basically looks through each sentence for the main ideas of it, i.e. actions and verbs. Then it tries to show those ideas visually, with a picture or video. It was a pretty neat project.
Hopefully that clears things up a little. I looked around for a page with a full description of their project, but I wasn't able to find one.