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.