I donno much about programming, or the scope of the project. Just "pouring" in some ideas that you can look into. Do something small, and elegant, without too many buttons, and minimal user input. It should do a lot once you feed something small in. This would have considerably impact, as it would seem that the program is working harder than it really is.
As in put in a word, or a phrase, and the program draws a chart based on inputs from the web. Or even without any inputs. Say something like a visual ticker of live google searches going on from India, or a spinning globe, with small twitter-birds flying out, with speech bubbles of current tweets from around the world. Maybe if the user gives an input, all the tweets related to the input show up in the map.
If you cannot interface with the web, a software to control the tags, names and directory structure of music would be great. What would be amazing is if there is just one button that goes "do it", and it fixes tags of music files based on the file names, and arranges them into directories without any user input whatsoever. Ok, maybe one tiny button where all the options are hidden. There are software that do some of these things, but you have to feed in the basic options, and in one operation, draw the tags from the files, and then the file names from the tags in the next, not both together based on logic. This can get tricky though, although you will have one set of rules for the output, you will have to think of all the possible ways the files will be messed up in for the input.
If the judges will actually look at the code, try pulling some stunt like a typical snake or guess the number game in something like 20 lines of code or less.
If you can explain what kind of project it is to non programmers, you may probably get more ideas.
:crazy: